Described as a spiky, sharp, intriguingly dark and tender book, full of pathos, fury and wit, Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss has received wide critical acclaim. In this podcast, Sarah Kanowski from Radio National’s Conversations talks with Meg about her unforgettable characters, the interplay between humour and suffering, and about her gentle rendering of mental illness.

Sorrow and Bliss: Meg Mason in conversation with Sarah Kanowski

In this Byron Writers Festival X BooksBooksBooks podcast collaboration, Pip Williams talks with Nicole Abadee about her novel, The Dictionary of Lost Words. They discuss the history of the Oxford English Dictionary, and how the exclusion of particular words inspired Williams' sweeping story of Esme as she sets about collecting the discarded vernacular of the English lexicon.

About the Book: 
Set when the women’s suffrage movement was at its height and the Great War loomed, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative,  hidden between the lines of a history written by men. It’s a delightful, lyrical and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words, and the power of language to shape our experience of the world.

The Dictionary of Lost Words: Pip Williams in conversation with Nicole Abadee

In this explorative conversation, authors Jessie Cole (Desire) and Nikki Gemmell (Dissolve) sit down with Zacharey Jane for an intimate and at times brutally honest chat about female desire in all its guises – from the purely physical to the more nuanced, deeper yearnings for personal growth, connection and fulfilment. 

Both Jessie and Nikki share how their writing practices have served to process lived experience and interrogate the impact of trauma, ultimately giving voice to the niggles of self-doubt that so-often pervade the female psyche.

Female Desire

Happy or Wise: James Kirby, Hilton Koppe, Robert Waldinger with David Roland

Humans everywhere pursue happiness, but is compassion the most healthy mind state? Panellists discuss the merits of achieving tranquillity through compassion.

Happy Or Wise

Living Recklessly: Marele Day in conversation with Susan Johnson

In her youth, amidst the throes of a reckless grief, aspiring Australian writer Marele Day was caught up in a shipwreck adventure and forged an unlikely bond with an international fugitive travelling under a pseudonym. For the next 30 years they corresponded before reuniting, both older and wiser, in France.

Living Recklessly

Growing into Autism: Sandra Thom-Jones in conversation with Mandy Nolan

Professor Sandra Thom-Jones thought she just had to try harder when daily life overwhelmed her, despite success in her career and home life. As she explains in her memoir, she grew to realise that she was autistic, her world very different to that experienced by neurotypical people.

Growing Into Autism

The Art of Noticing: Susan Johnson, Maggie MacKeller, Peter Polites with Jill Eddington

At the heart of good fiction is a piercing appreciation for human motivation. Three novelists reveal how they mine everyday life for personal stories. These include discovering the perils of taking an elderly mother to live overseas, reflecting on being a mother living in nature on a farm and saluting a Greek mother who made her life in Australia.

The Art Of Noticing

From the dangers of inherited magical powers, to haunted North Sea islands where witches were once hunted to a Danish fairytale about a woman swallowed by the sea, novelists Sarah Armstrong, Eliza Henry-Jones and Holly Ringland tell Kári Gíslason how old tales become new in their fiction.

Myth And Folklore in Literature

Sometimes the people who make us laugh find the joke is on them. Comic writers Shirley Le, Myf Warhurst and Oliver Phommavanh reveal to Mandy Nolan their wildest dreams and the day they came true.

My Wildest Dreams

Older women know that our society, smitten with youthfulness, devalues them in ways that can diminish their self-worth. In this episode Susan Johnson, Jacinta Parsons and Tracey Spicer discuss ways to reclaim pride in one’s ageing self – including by living disgracefully.

Living Disgracefully

With our social media feeds constantly inundating us with images of trauma, Black Joy is an expression of resistance and healing. Storytellers Maxine Beneba Clarke, Bebe Backhouse and Nakkiah Lui discuss with poet Cheryl Leavy what Black Joy means to them.

Black Joy

Media is undergoing rapid change. Four journalists explore how that change can threaten democracy itself and how the Fourth Estate can retain its key tenets, safeguarding its role as the public’s watchdog.

The Mungo Panel

Trustworthy news is essential to a healthy democracy but in 2023 misinformation is rife. Three panellists discuss with The Conversation Editor Misha Ketchell how and why misinformation and disinformation derail public debate and what we can do about it.

Misinformation

Our housing is in crisis. Ownership is out of reach for many, rents are through the roof and homelessness is on the rise. This panel explores the causes of the problem and possible pathways to a better future.

Home, Elusive Home

What does it mean to be free? Lea Ypi grew up in Stalinist Albania, one of the most isolated countries on earth and a place where Communist ideals had officially replaced religion.

Free

One of Australia’s best-loved broadcasters, Richard Fidler takes us into the world of medieval wanderers who wrote of their travels to the edges of the known world during Islam's fabled Golden Age.

In conversation with Kári Gíslason.

The Book Of Roads And Kingdoms

Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here is a luminous, compelling and utterly surprising memoir by Heather Rose, the bestselling author of Stella Prize-winner The Museum of Modern Love and Bruny. Heartbreaking and beautiful, this is a love story brimming with courage and joy against all odds, one that will bring wonder, light and comfort to all who read it.

Heather Rose in conversation with Jill Eddington.

Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here

Investigative journalist, Anke Richter, discusses how she immersed herself in the wild world of cults around the globe, exposing the ways they attract, entrap and destroy otherwise ordinary people.

Anke Richter in conversation with Zacharey Jane.

Cult Trip

We are surrounded by death in news, true-crime podcasts and even nursery rhymes. Yet from an early age, we are told that death is to be feared. How can we know what we're so afraid of, if we don’t examine it?

Hayley Campbell in conversation with Kerry Sunderland.

All The Living And The Dead

Speculating about the future, interrogating the past and understanding through storytelling unite three writers. A historian and two novelists describe how their approaches to writing allow them to imagine – and reimagine – past, present and future.

Michelle Arrow, Grace Chan, Shankari Chandran with Phillipa McGuinness.

What If Everything We Imagine Comes True

Stories are passed down through the generations. Expectations are too. Three novelists whose writings reflect their diverse family backgrounds share how the stories they inherited inform their writing.

Shankari Chandran, Shirley Le, Peter Polites with Jemma Birrell.

The Family Spark

The science has long been there, but it will take imagination to win the world over to climate action. To authors who have reimagined songs and witchy tales discuss how fiction can spark the energy we need.

Eliza Henry-Jones, Mark Smith with Nell Schofield.

Green Imaginings

Silent quitting, climate quitting, goblin mode, human sustainability, leaning out. What are all these terms and what age are we living in? How is language evolving to describe how we live now and what do all those catch-phrases mean? 

Ellen van Neerven, Alison Pennington, Kristine Ziwica and Paul Barclay.

Checking Out

Don Watson spoke to David Leser about his book 'The Bush' at the 2015 Byron Bay Writers Festival.

Don Watson

In conversation with Charlotte Wood at the 2016 Byron Writers Festival.

In honour of Georgia Blain

When Baird set out to write Victoria, she wanted to examine how the queen wielded power during her reign and how far – or little it seems – our acceptance of powerful women has come. The book chronicles Victoria’s life, but unlike other histories of the queen it charts her role as an “incredibly powerful working mother”, and explores how she managed her nine pregnancies and raising children while the monarch.

Byron Writers Festival 2017 Podcast Series

Victoria the Queen: Julia Baird in conversation with Caroline Baum

In this poignant session, recorded live at the 2018 Byron Writers Festival, Jessie Cole, Walter Mikac and Hannah Richell talk to Jesse Blackadder about their experiences of writing through grief. They have each lived through devastating experiences, and here, they bravely share their stories.

First Open A Vein: Writing Through Personal Pain

Gabriel Fox, the young son of an old English house, arrives in a land both ancient and new.

Drawn by the promise of his heart's desire, and compelled to distance himself from pain at home, Gabriel begins his quest into Van Diemen's Land.

His guide, a Cannibal who is not all he seems, leads him north where Gabriel might free himself of his distracting burden and seek the woman he must find. As Gabriel traverses this wild country, he uncovers new truths buried within his own memory.

In this Conversations from Byron podcast, winner of the 2020 Australian Vogel Literary Prize, K.M. Kruimink speaks with fellow Vogel shortlister Emily Brugman about the characters and themes of her novel, about the experience of winning the Vogel, and where her love of literature comes from.

A Treacherous Country: K.M. Kruimink in conversation with Emily Brugman

The Thea Astley Address, named in honour of one of Australia’s most influential and distinctive novelists, has been presented annually at the Byron Writers Festival since 2005 - by some of Australia’s best writers and most interesting minds. This year, we add to the prestigious list Professor Marcia Langton, one of our country's most important voices for Indigenous Australia. The 2020 Thea Astley Address, entitled Black Lives Matter, is supported by The Conversation and the Copyright Agency's Cultural Fund.

In this powerful address, Marcia Langton explores how Black Lives Matter in Australia, through history, in the present and for our future. She takes us back to the death of Mulrunji, or Cameron Doomadgee, in custody on Palm Island in 2004, and the subsequent failure of the police and the criminal justice system to deliver justice for the deceased and his family. Langton tracks many similar cases, shining a light on the crisis in which we find ourselves as a nation, and demands the implementation of long-overdue recommendations from the 1987 - 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

Black Lives Matter: The 2020 Thea Astley Address delivered by Professor Marcia Langton

In this conversation, recorded live as part of Byron Writers Festival's out-of-season program, author and academic Jenny Hocking joins celebrated journalist Kerry O’Brien to discuss her revealing new book The Palace Letters: The Queen, the governor-general, and the plot to dismiss Gough Whitlam. In this ground breaking account, Hocking discloses the obstruction, intrigue and duplicity she faced during her 10-year campaign to expose the truth behind the dismissal.

The Palace Letters: Jenny Hocking in conversation with Kerry O'Brien

Byron Writers Festival is a not-for-profit, member-based organisation offering a year-round program of workshops, seminars and events for writers and readers. Our annual festival, held in August, is the largest regional Writers Festival in Australia.

Byron Writers Festival

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