Name: A conversation with Helen Garner by The Readings Podcast
Duration: 31 min 58 s
Description: Hear our bookseller Sean O’Beirne in conversation with author Helen Garner about her 50-year writing career.

In today’s episode, a conversation with writer, podcaster and academic Amy Lovat, author of the new novel, Big Feelings, a neurotic, anti-romantic comedy for fans of Fleabag and High Fidelity. 

Our protagonist Sadie Thomas is obsessed with love stories, and whether hers stacks up – for the perfect love story is all Sadie has ever wanted. Her parents' story is what rom-com dreams are made of. But, so far, no one has offered the Happily Ever After that Sadie is searching for. In meeting the charismatic Chase, Sadie is ready for her sail-off-into-the-sunset, credits-roll happy ending. But being a self-saboteur, Sadie is left to ponder the mess of how life and love went so wrong.

Amy Lovat in conversation

In today’s episode, a conversation with Rhett Davis, author of a new novel, Arborescence. 

Bren works for an obscure company with colleagues he's never met, and who might not be real. His partner, Caelyn, is looking for something more but isn't sure what. The only thing she knows for certain is that humans are breaking the world and she's powerless to do anything about it. 

Arborescence is a compelling, deeply moving novel about connection and disconnection, ambition and apathy, loss and hope, and how we don't always know what we have until the damage is done.

Rhett Davis in conversation

In today’s episode, a conversation with respected journalist and acclaimed novelist Paul Daley, author of a new book, The Leap. 

The Leap is an outback town fuelled by fear, churning with corruption, prejudice and misogyny – and blighted by its inescapable history of frontier violence. Into this nightmarish morass falters traumatised British diplomat, Benedict Fotheringham-Gaskill. He’s on his first Australian mission, one seemingly straightforward enough – until he arrives in The Leap to battle a town conspiring against him.

Paul Daley in conversation

In today’s episode, a conversation with a longtime Readings favourite, Toni Jordan, about her most recent book, Tenderfoot. 

The story is set in Brisbane, 1975: Andie Tanner's world is small but whole. Her mum is complicated, but she adores her dad and the kennel of racing greyhounds that live under their house. Andie is a serious girl with plans: finish school with her friends, then apprentice to her father until she can become a greyhound trainer, with dogs of her very own. 

But real life rarely goes to plan, and the world is bigger and more complicated than Andie could imagine. When she loses everything she cares about – her family, her friends, the dogs – it's up to Andie to reclaim her future. She will need all her wits to survive this new reality of secrets and half-truths, addictions and crime.

Toni Jordan in conversation

In this episode, a recording taken from the launch of Monica Raszewski's Crimson Light Polished Wood. 

Leonora, a British teacher, has relocated to Melbourne and falls in love with Margaret, a fellow female teacher who three years later dies of cancer. While still grieving for Margaret, Leonora meets and befriends Anna, the Polish woman who lives next door. As Leonora becomes increasingly involved with Anna and her family the novel illuminates with subtle ease the influence Leonora has on Anna's daughter, Lydia, introducing her to the wonderful world of literature and art. 

This is a novel about the ways we all long for acceptance and the ways in which those we might feel most in touch with including parents, siblings and mentors can often have different values and views about us. As such it is a beautiful work about art, gender, disappointment, understanding and celebration.

Monica Raszewski in conversation

In this episode, a conversation with Andrew Pippos, the author of Lucky’s, awarded the Readings Prize for Fiction, on his new, forthcoming book, The Transformations. 

In the fading glow of Australia's print journalism era, The National is more than a newspaper: it's an institution, and the only place that George Desoulis has ever felt at home. A world-weary subeditor with a bookish sensibility and a painful past, George is one of nature's loners. But a late-night encounter with an unorthodox and self-assured reporter, Cassandra Gwan, begins to unravel both of their carefully managed worlds. As the decline of the newspaper enters a desperate stage, George and Cassandra struggle to balance their turbulent relationship with their responsibilities to family, and the compromises each has built their life upon. 

With a deft wit and a sharp eye for emotional complexity, Pippos examines the stories we tell ourselves, and the ways people handle grief, guilt and generational change. The Transformations is a novel about endings – of dreams, relationships, institutions – and the chance of new beginnings.

Andrew Pippos in conversation

In this episode, a conversation with Bri Lee, the acclaimed and bestselling author of Eggshell Skull and The Work, and of a new novel, Seed. 

Mitchell is a brilliant biologist, committed to the environment and the growing global antinatalist movement. For one month each year he lives with his colleague Frances in a utopia of radical equality and scientific dedication in Antarctica. They are concluding the Anarctos Project: a seed vault in an isolated, secret location. It is a biodiversity insurance policy against humanity's devastating effects on the rapidly warming planet. But when their helicopter doesn't pick them up, and strange things begin to happen, their faith in science is suddenly not enough. Mitchell has been keeping big secrets - from Frances and from himself. The ice haunts him with memories of a devastating betrayal and questions of legacy and fairness crowd his mind. If they don't get back to McMurdo Station before the last flight home they face a long dark polar winter together. Alone. As the days get shorter, these two people of firm logic and reason begin finding fault lines in their perfect social experiment. 

Thrilling, original and almost unbearably suspenseful, Seed offers an uneasy glimpse into isolation, love and our worst fears.

Bri Lee in conversation

This is a very special instalment of the podcast, as we have not one, not two nor three, but four interviews with four award winners – the 2025 winners of the four categories of The Reading Prize.

First presented in 2014, The Readings Prize supports new and outstanding Australian voices across three separate categories of fiction: Children’s, Young Adult and New Australian Fiction. The Readings Prize is unique in the Australian literary landscape as it’s the only prize currently run by an independent bookshop and supporting emerging Australian voices. Winners of each category are awarded $5000 and the winner of the Gab Williams Prize, which is judged by the Readings Teen Advisory Board, wins $1000. 

To celebrate The Readings Prize in 2025 we have brought together short interviews with each of the winners and the respective Chair of Judges for your listening pleasure.

The winners of The Readings Prize in conversation

In this episode, a conversation with poet Ender Başkan, author of a new book, Two Hundred Million Musketeers. 

In this work, Başkan explores the complexities of parenthood and family life, and anxieties about the future his children will grow up in. It maps the shifting trains of thought when one’s attention is drawn in many different directions – between child-rearing and house-keeping, domestic crises, the need to earn a living, and the responsibilities you have to the past as well as to the future, to your own parents and grandparents, as well as to your children.

Ender Başkan in conversation

In this episode, a conversation with author Sarah Housley, author of the new book, Designing Hope. 

When did we stop dreaming of a better future? What happened to the science fiction golden age of the 1950s, when futurism flourished as a discipline and drove innovation? As a society, we either struggle to imagine something good for the times to come, or we fail to picture any future at all. Our world is in polycrisis: we face climate breakdown, societal fracturing, governmental collapse, war, and rising inequality. The exciting outcomes we dreamed of, from the space race to wonder material plastic, have brought contingent problems of their own. We haven’t yet developed mainstream and accessible new narratives to replace these failures, and if you ask someone to imagine ‘the future’, they’ll probably still picture flying cars. 

Designing Hope resets expectations. Through the lens of four emerging futures, Sarah Housley shows us visions of hope that inspire action and critical thinking about how we’ll live in the decades to come.

Sarah Housley in conversation

Hear our bookseller Sean O’Beirne in conversation with author Helen Garner about her 50-year writing career.

A conversation with Helen Garner

The Readings Podcast is a celebration of books, reading and culture. Episodes are published weekly and include author interviews, event recordings, booksellers chatting about their favourite reads, industry insights, and more.

A conversation with Helen Garner

The Readings Podcast

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