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What is the secret to writing a really juicy biography? Author Caroline Baum interviews seasoned players and persistent newcomers who share their experience of navigating sensitive territory...
Errol Flynn is still the most famous Australian actor ever to make it big in Hollywood. Best known for athletic and romantic leads in films...
Peter Matthiessen was a giant of American twentieth century letters, and the only writer ever to win the National Book Award in both the fic...
Before Ash Barty, there was Evonne Goolagong, the first First Nations champion at Wimbledon. She was a player endowed with natural ability b...
After the success of her debut novel My Brilliant Career, Australian writer Miles Franklin faced a familiar problem: how to write her next b...
Between 1974 and 1991 Frank Arkell was the flamboyant mayor of Wollongong. But his name is forever associated with the infamy of being accus...
Authorised biographies, especially of those in high office, tend to suffer from being overly respectful if not downright deferential. But in...
In this very revealing memoir/biography hybrid, bestselling author Bryce Courtenay's son Adam explores the motives and personality traits th...
Elizabeth Harrower is not a household name in Australian writing, so how has she ended up with not one but two biographies, both published w...
Australian poet Dorothy Porter blazed across the literary scene like a meteor. She was even more seductive in real life than on the page and...
Although there are several biographies of big game fishing bestselling American author Zane Grey, none of them focus on his two visits to Au...
Fearless Beatrice Faust is an overdue biography of a significant reformist force in the women's liberation movement of the 60s and 70s in Au...
American film critic Carrie Rickey has written the first biography of celebrated French cinema pioneer, Agnes Varda. Varda was born in Belgi...
The Bravest Scout at Gallipoli is a fascinating biographical investigation into the life of Harry Freame - a half Australian, half Japanese...
To mark the sesquicentenary of Jane Austen's birth, this episode is an edited version of an event for Sydney Writers Festival. Speakers are...
In 2024 a story appeared in the Toronto Star by Deborah Dundas that set the world of biography on fire. At the centre of it was Alice Munro'...
Dominic Amerena is a rising young Australian writer who has chosen a biographer as the central figure in his novel I Want Everything. His am...
In a first for Life Sentences, host Caroline Baum welcomes a panel of four Australian biographers to discuss the biographies they have read...
Past biographies have always dismissed Pamela Harriman as a socialite who slept her way to the top, in a series of affairs and marriages tha...
Past biographies have always dismissed Pamela Harriman as a socialite who slept her way to the top, in a series of affairs and marriages tha...
Race Matthews had a distinguished career as a federal politician and Victorian state Minister, but the highlight of his career was his time...
Painter Charles Blackman described himself as a guttersnipe when he met and fell in love with partially sighted poet Barbara Patterson. Toge...
Recorded live as part of Sydney Writers Festival 2024, this is a three way conversation between three biographers - Nadia Wheatley, Brigitta...
Anthony Sharwood set out to investigate how Australia's highest peak comes to be named after an eighteenth century freedom fighter and milit...
The official history of Australia may have forgotten colourful rogues like Tom Ley, but Mudgee painter Michael Bourke has painted a biograph...
Caroline Hodgson took the name Madame Brussels to become the 'flash madam' of Melbourne in the post Gold Rush era. Her business sense for bu...
When Caroline Baum interviewed Fleet Street veteran royal correspondent Robert Jobson about his new, very favourable biography of Katherine,...
For decades, Kitty Kelley has held the reputation as the queen of celebrity biography in the US, writing juicy and revealing accounts of the...
Donald Horne was Australia’s leading public intellectual in the sixties and seventies and coined the phrase The Lucky Country in his bestsel...
There has never been anyone like Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev. The Russian impresario shook up the dusty world of ballet, making it th...
Recorded in the lead up the UK election of 2024, this is a conversation with Labour Party Leader Keir Starmer’s biographer, journalist and f...
Most people are unaware of the existence of the Australian Dictionary of National Biography, a remarkable effort of scholarship by an army o...
To fully enjoy this episode, it is recommended that you watch the documentary Turn Every Page about the unique working relationship between...
This content is from BIO, The US based Biographers International Organisation, which promotes and champions the practice of biography to wri...
Historian Kate Fullagar tells the story of the intertwined destinies of Governor Phillip and First Nations leader Bennelong, beginning with...
An elegant Trotskyist, Michael Pablo grew up in Greece to become an urbane revolutionary, who made his presence felt at many of the most sig...
She is part Japanese, part Haitian but trained and lives in the US. Nothing about Naomi Osaka is conventional, but she forged her career in...
Perth based skin and burns surgeon Professor Fiona Wood is one of the most trusted and admired figures in Australian life and yet it took he...
In George Harrison, The Reluctant Beatle, veteran rock journalist and biographer Philip Norman (author of the definitive Beatles book, Shout...
One of the most puzzling and flamboyant women on the streets of Sydney in the twentieth century, Bee Miles became the stuff of legend, a cel...
Catharine Lumby is the first out of the gate of two biographers to tackle the many-faceted life of author Frank Moorhouse, who was a well kn...
Every Australian knows My Country , the poem that made Dorothea Mackellar famous at a young age. But very few people know much about her lif...
Anna Funder has already garnered international praise for her non fiction (Stasiland) and fiction (All That I Am) In Wifedom, she does somet...
William Cooper was a remarkable Yorta Yorta man from Victoria, born in the 1860s who sought justice for his people by petitioning the Britis...
Often acclaimed as one of the world’s greatest singer songwriters, and compared to Paul McCartney, who is a fan, Neil Finn has had a pretty...
She was one of the finest poets Australia has ever produced but Gwen Harwood was also a very mischievous woman, who played literary pranks o...
Nora Ephron had it all: success, love, friendship, a brilliantly original voice, personal style. As the writer of Heartburn, When Harry Met...
Award-winning investigative journalist and political biographer Margaret Simons was hesitant about undertaking a biography of Tanya Pliberse...
In the second part of this conversation John Lahr talks about Arthur Miller’s disastrous marriage to Marilyn Monroe how it came about and di...
Theatre’s most respected critic, New Yorker critic and biographer John Lahr has compressed his deep understanding of Arthur Miller’s life an...
While Shirley Hazzard has many devoted admirers and readers, particularly for her best known novel The Transit of Venus, many would be unawa...