In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, the historian Dr Kiera Lindsey chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Wild Love: The Ambitions of Adelaide Ironside, the First Australian Artist to Astonish the World.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

• Adelaide Eliza Scott Ironside was a trailblazing Australian artist known for her passion, ambition and extraordinary talent. Born in Sydney in 1831, she challenged artistic boundaries by exploring themes such as identity, sexuality and spirituality
• Why Kiera Lindsey challenged the traditional narrative of Australian art history
• Why Adelaide Ironside’s story is still so relevant today
• How Kiera painstakingly pieced together tiny scraps of evidence from 19th-century historical records in which women were mostly invisible
• How following in Adelaide’s footsteps in colonial Sydney, London, Rome, Florence and Scotland from 200 years ago contributed to the narrative
• The limits Kiera placed on her imagination when speculating to fill gaps in the fragmentary historical record
• How Kiera portrayed the cultural norms, societal values and prevailing ideologies in which Adelaide successfully pursued her artistic ambitions
• How Kiera interpreted Adelaide’s romantic mysticism, which appeared in her poetry and paintings
• The art and craft of speculative biography, as well as its relevance and impacts.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, the critically acclaimed author, Oxford scholar, literature teacher and performer Dr Sally Bayley chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about The Green Lady: A Spirit, A Story, A Place.

Part memoir, part fiction, The Green Lady is an experimental mix of biography, fiction and family history.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

• The Green Lady explores a child’s search for artistic education and a sense of self. Lyrical and playful, Sally Bayley’s writing transports readers into an eccentric world of teachers, guardians and guiding spirits of place. Moved by her female teachers, and guided by the artist J.M.W. Turner, Bayley’s protagonist goes in search of her maternal ancestors, especially her grandmother, Edna May Turner.
• Sally’s inspiration for crafting The Green Lady, the final book in her experimental literary coming of age trilogy of a young girl immersing herself in the world of lyrical language and poetry
• Why Sally crafted The Green Lady as an experimental mix of biography, fiction and family history
• The meaning of the title, The Green Lady
• How The Green Lady continued Virginia Woolf’s Orlando as an imagined biography
• How Sally crafted deeply sensory and visceral narrative filled with vivid visual imagery, poetry, music, song, drama and movement
• Sally’s response to the question: ‘Who gets to be the subject of a biography and have their life told, and who remains invisible?’

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, memoirist Lamisse Hamouda chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting The Shape of Dust. Lamisse co-authored this deeply disturbing account with her father Hazem Hamouda. It chronicles Hazem’s wrongful arrest in Egypt and Lamisse’s desperate 443-day struggle to free him from Tora, one of Egypt’s most notorious prisons. The Shape of Dust won the 2024 National Biography Award.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

• The meaning of the book’s title The Shape of Dust
• Why Lamisse and Hazem decided to craft The Shape of Dust when it risked triggering the horrific trauma of their experiences
• Why Lamisse framed the story around trauma
• How Lamisse navigated multiple languages, cultures and worlds while crafting The Shape of Dust
• Why Lamisse structured the book in three parts, with Part One comprising first-person accounts of what happened day by day, with Lamisse and Hazem taking it in turns to narrate their experiences
• Lamisse’s literary choices to reduce the terror and brutality of Hazem’s experiences for them as the authors and their readers
• Lamisse’s ethical decisions on which aspects of Hazem’s story to share
• The extent to which Lamisse self-censored her commentary about Egyptian and Australian politics; Australia’s consular services in Egypt; and Australian journalists
• How writing The Shape of Dust has changed Lamisse’s perception of colonisation and systemic racism in Australia.