Biographers in Conversation

Cynthia Banham "Mother Shadow: A Meditation on Maternal Inheritance"

In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Cynthia Banham chats with Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Mother Shadow: A Meditation on Maternal Inheritance.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: 
A hybrid of biographical reimagining, lyrical memoir and transnational family history, Mother Shadow is poetic, with whimsical detours and meditative qualities.
The discovery of a torn 1898 birth certificate Cynthia found in a small packet of rescued family documents revealed that her great-grandmother Natalina wasn’t an orphan but a foundling, abandoned by her mother Ersilia, an unmarried peasant woman. 
Mother Shadow follows two interwoven emotional journeys: Cythnia’s detective-like quest to understand why Ersilia gave up Natalina, and her own reckoning with feelings of maternal inadequacy. 
Mother Shadow underwent many structural drafts before a mentor helped Cynthia to reorganise it thematically, weaving resonances between Ersilia’s 19th-century story and Banham’s own contemporary experience of mothering.
When an anthropologist raised the possibility of family abuse as an explanation for Ersilia’s circumstances, Cynthia agonised over whether to include it. Ultimately, she decided that honesty about confronting possibilities was an ethical obligation.
Cynthia’s advice for authors crafting hybrid forms of life writing is to understand why a story grabs them before they embark on the project because the answer is part of the story itself. ‘Start writing early, embrace many drafts, and understand that uncovering family history means navigating the question of who owns the past’, Cynthia suggests. ‘Not everyone in a family will answer the same way.’

Sheryle Bagwell "Letter from Provence: Two Women, Two Centuries and a Village House in France"

In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Sheryle Bagwell chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Letter from Provence: Two Women, Two Centuries and a Village House in France.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Sheryle Bagwell explains how the chance discovery of a dust-covered volume of Madame de Sévigné’s letters in her Provençal attic became the catalyst for a story she had been unconsciously preparing to write for several decades. 
Sheryle reveals that the ‘two women’ of the subtitle are her mother Judith and Madame de Sévigné, a distinction that reframes the emotional architecture of the story.
Sheryle describes how Madame de Sévigné, writing before the age of newspapers, effectively functioned as the world’s first blogger, giving her intimate circle and ultimately history, eyewitness accounts of Louis XIV’s court through letters she knew were being read aloud and passed around.
Sheryle describes the discovery that her mother Judith and Madame de Sévigné had striking parallels. Both were feisty and both died without their daughters present, which became the emotional spine of the story.
Sheryle reflects on writing the book later in life as an intentional choice: ‘I don’t think I could have written this book in mid-career’, she said. ‘I needed the wisdom that comes later in life to honestly reckon with a childhood shaped by domestic violence and a mother who never got to escape it.’
Sheryle closes the story with a letter to her mother written from Provence, which she describes as the first letter she ever wrote to her mother, and the one the entire story was always travelling towards.

Nigel Hamilton "Lincoln vs. Davis: The War of the Presidents"

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Nigel Hamilton chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Lincoln vs. Davis: The War of the Presidents.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Lincoln vs. Davis is the first dual biography to examine how Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis fought each other as presidents and commanders-in-chief of their respective forces, the Union and the Confederacy, during the American Civil War.
Lincoln and Davis coincidentally began train journeys to their Presidential inaugurations on the same day.
By framing emancipation as a military order during a national emergency rather than civilian legislation, Lincoln legally freed 3.5 million enslaved people and ensured no European power would ever recognise the Confederacy, dooming Davis’s rebellion.
Frustrated that historians have covered up crucial details and failed to explain why Lincoln delayed emancipation for nearly two years, Nigel Hamilton crafted Lincoln vs. Davis to correct the historical record, practising what he refers to as ‘biography as corrective’.

Zachary Leader "Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker"

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Zachary Leader chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: 
Richard Ellmann’s biography of the novelist James Joyce is considered the greatest literary biography of the 20th century.
Why Zachary Leader was inspired to craft Ellmann’s Joyce.
Why Ellmann’s Joyce is structured in two sections: a chronological life of Richard Ellmann followed by a thematic ‘making of James Joyce’s biography’ section.
Why Zachary opened the narrative with a chapter defending literary biography.
Why Zachary portrayed Ellmann’s James Joyce as both scholarship and art, foregrounding Ellmann’s narrative craft, wit and realist virtues.
Why Ellmann’s Joyce is a practical masterclass in biography.

Micaela Sahhar "Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family"

In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Micaela Sahhar chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
The death of Micaela Sahhar’s grandmother’s last surviving sister created a sense of urgency for Micaela to capture her Palestinian family’s stories before they slipped beyond living memory.
With many primary sources destroyed in the 1948 Nakba, Micaela learned to read absence as a form of evidence, drawing on object memory, fragments, photographs, and ephemeral archives to reconstruct what official records could not.
Micaela’s grandfather’s late-life oral history tapes were a vital source of historical and family information. They looped between present and past, between stories and digressions and became a structural model for the encyclopaedic, non-linear form of Find Me at the Jaffa Gate.
In 2023, Micaela visited Jerusalem to retrace her family’s footsteps through the Old City. She recalls that walking the actual terrain, up hills, distances and ordinary neighbourhoods, brought a present-tense vividness to the story.
Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is structured as a 48-entry encyclopaedia spanning four generations of Micaela’s Palestinian family, from the streets of Jerusalem and Bethlehem to the Palestinian community of Melbourne.

Karen Fang "Background Artist: The Life and Work of Tyrus Wong"

In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Professor Karen Fang chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Background Artist: The Life and Work of Tyrus Wong.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Karen Fang explains why only a full-length biography could do justice to Tyrus Wong’s 106-year life that encompassed his achievements across fine art, animation, Hollywood storyboarding, greeting cards and kite-making.
Karen reveals that the title Background Artist is Tyrus Wong’s Disney credit in the original 1942 release of the movie Bambi.
Among the most revealing archival discoveries was Tyrus Wong’s personal correspondence that showed a wickedly funny, warm and creatively restless person that no formal interview could have captured.
Karen reveals how Tyrus Wong’s signature visual style, rooted in Chinese brush painting technique and aesthetic heritage, transformed racial difference from a liability into an artistic asset, enabling him to succeed in a society that otherwise offered very little opportunity to Chinese Americans.
The closing passages of Background Artist tie together the themes of visibility, immigration and artistic legacy, ending with the line Karen says came directly from her conversations with Tyrus Wong’s daughters: ‘Tyrus was always simply an artist.’

Debra Adelaide "When I Am Sixty-Four"

In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, award-winning author Dr Debra Adelaide chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting When I Am Sixty-Four.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: 
When I Am Sixty-Four is a tender, poignant story based on Debra Adelaide’s lifelong friendship with the award-winning author, Gabrielle Carey.
When I Am Sixty-Four began not as a planned book but as a single vivid memory that arrived unbidden while she was working on another project; it simply refused to let go.
A work of extraordinary depth and grace, When I Am Sixty-Four is crafted as autofiction, a hybrid genre that blurs the line between fiction and autobiography.
Debra defines autofiction as writing memoir using the tools of narrative fiction, shaping, rearranging, condensing, and inventing to reach for a broader emotional truth.
Debra explains her decision not to name Gabrielle or anyone else in the book, wanting readers to bring their own experiences of loving someone in despair to the narrative.
Debra describes the story’s mosaic structure of vignettes as entirely instinctive. The final tragic months of her friend’s life provide a loose chronological spine, while memories from their 50 years of shared history were weaved in. 
The story’s dark humour, Debra explains, was both an authentic expression of who Gabrielle Carey was, a woman with an extraordinary laugh, and a deliberate way of honouring her.

Troy Bramston: "Gough Whitlam: The Vista of the New"

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Troy Bramston chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Gough Whitlam: The Vista of the New. This is the first full biography of Gough Whitlam, a former Australian Prime Minister, since his death in 2014.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
The biography’s subtitle The Vista of the New came from a poem Gough Whitlam wrote in 1934 as a student at Canberra Grammar School. In it, he imagines a bolder brighter future for Australia.
The biography’s central theme is political leadership.
Troy Bramston is interested in how power is gained, used and lost.
Gough Whitlam’s school reports noted his difficulty getting along with others. These interpersonal failures would contribute to his downfall decades later.
Troy argues that Whitlam was not a man of destiny but a man of history, driven not by a sense of predestination but by a hunger to change Australia’s direction.
Troy makes a compelling case for advancing the biographical subject. Continually asking what is new, he argues that a biography that doesn’t tell us something we didn’t know before, however well written, fails to fully justify itself.

Ian Hembrow: "Celsius: A Life and Death by Degrees"

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Ian Hembrow chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about his choices while crafting Celsius: A Life and Death by Degrees.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
Celsius: A Life and Death by Degrees is the first full-length English biography of Anders Celsius, a modest Swedish astronomer who quietly revolutionised our understanding of the natural world.
Ian Hembrow’s accidental discovery of Celsius’s story in 2016 sparked a years’-long quest that led him to the Arctic Circle, retracing Celsius’s 1736–37 expedition to measure the shape of the Earth.
Celsius’s story is set against the backdrop of the European Enlightenment, illustrating how he thrived in the vibrant 18th-century scientific community while unlocking fundamental mysteries of nature.
Ian Hembrow draws connections to the present, noting that Celsius, who is best known for inventing the 100-point centigrade temperature scale, now lends his name to global climate targets as humanity strives to limit warming to 1.5°C.
How Ian Hembrow delves into Celsius’s human story, sharing the personal struggles and triumphs behind his scientific achievements and offering a poignant reminder that even great scientific minds face immense personal challenges.
The relevance of Celsius’s story today, reminding us of the crucial role of scientific inquiry and our shared responsibility to use knowledge wisely as we face urgent challenges like climate change.

Hester Kaplan: "Twice Born: Finding My Father In the Margins of Biography"

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Hester Kaplan chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Twice Born: Finding My Father In the Margins of Biography.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: 
The catalyst for crafting Twice Born was the death of Hester’s father, the biographer Justin Kaplan. Hester realised she had lost the chance to ask her father the questions that had always eluded her during his lifetime.
Rather than being a conventional biography, Twice Born blends biography, memoir, and fiction, a structure Kaplan chose deliberately to view her father from many different angles and points of view, enabling her to know him in ways impossible while he was alive.
Kaplan discovered that her father chose Mark Twain as his biographical subject because of deep personal parallels that included an early loss of parents, a traumatic childhood and an identity reinvented through writing. Hester insists that biographers inevitably choose subjects who mirror their own inner lives.
Kaplan reflects on how memory and fiction blur once put on the page.
Because Justin Kaplan always wrote behind closed study doors, his daughter uses fiction to imaginatively enter that space and reconstruct his writing process.