Hannah Kent’s love affair with Iceland was launched by her selection as an exchange student aged 17. Although she felt isolated and lonely in the depth of an Icelandic winter, she was changed forever by the experience which led to her first major novel ‘Burial Rites’.
Recorded at Bellingen Readers and Writers Festival 2025
David Holmgren is best known as one of the co-originators of Permaculture with Bill Mollison. He is the author of a wide range of books and essays about permaculture and community resilience. Here he explains why ‘retro suburbia’ is a better solution than starting from scratch.
Recorded at Bellingen Readers and Writers Festival 2025
Teenage female friendships are so intense they can be all consuming. A class of teenage girls from an elite private girl’s school go on a camping trip in the Australian bush. Four of them get separated and a male teacher to look for them But he never returns and the girls aren’t talking. Language warning in this read!
Recorded at Bellingen Readers and Writers Festival 2025
This novel travels from the Himalayas to Darwin with Bird, a young woman evading a forced marriage. Somewhere along her journey she has been shot, but awakens in hospital in Darwin with no recollection of what has happened.
Recorded at Bellingen Readers and Writers Festival 2025
This novel is one long prose poem divided into 36 smaller ‘poems’. They are punchy, wry and solemn – meditations on life and relationships. Here Nam Le reads two of them beautifully.
Recorded at the Byron Writers Festival 2024
Megan Wynne-Jones reads three poems from her collection ‘Speak it Like a River’. The book is delightfully filled with sketches, collages and photo montages which sometimes relate to her poems other times are just flights of her imagination. The images were all produced by her and even her children! A lovely bedside book to dip into.
Recorded at Studio 3 Bangalow 2024
The Alternatives follows four , brainy sisters as they navigate a path back to a closer relationship. This read is from the first chapter of the book as they attend a lesson in the geological formation of Ireland. Caolinn told me that in Ireland, to call someone ‘alternative’ is not a compliment!
Recorded at the Byron Writers Festival 2024
History has glossed over, forgotten or just outright ignored the roles of women in wars down through the ages. Women have been soldiers, caterers, comfort companions , weapons maintainers, and more. In fact no historical army travelled without them.
Recorded at the Byron Writers Festival 2024
Imagine being thrown into a Guatemalan jail for no reason with no way of knowing when you could be freed? This experience and that of her fellow female cellmates, sets Clemence on a journey to discover how the world treats women in poorer countries, the many ways they are oppressed and helps us understand why they would risk everything to try and gain a better life for themselves and their families.
Recorded at Studio 3 Bangalow 2025
The Tetley family are a tight knit working class family who have suffered a major loss in their family. They deal with their grief in different ways after the sudden death of Elena.
Recorded at Byron Writers Festival 2024