In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Kathryn Heyman chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Circle of Wonders.

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

• ‘Circle of Wonders’ is a novel about a group of women who gather in the Blue Mountains to support their friend Ronnie Bloom through the final month of her life.
• ‘Circle of Wonders’ began as a memoir shortly after Kathryn’s sister and mother died in the same month during 2020.
• Ten weeks later, Kathryn decided to write the book as fictional version of the story. It is then that she found the story’s circular, lunar structure.
• Kathryn explains why the story needed multiple voices rather than one: capturing an ‘ensemble’ or ‘choral’ experience of community meant she no longer had the ethical right to tell it as memoir.
• Kathryn reflects on the ethics of writing about real people.
• Drawing on William Faulkner, Kathryn distinguishes facts from emotional truth, arguing that fiction can sometimes reach a more profoundly truthful place than memoir by freeing the writer from strict fidelity to external events.
• The book’s structure mirrors the lunar cycle, with the final breath looping back into the first sentence, reflecting Kathryn’s belief that ‘all time is now’ and every ending is also a beginning.
• Kathryn closes our conversation with advice for writers straddling memoir, biography and fiction: write the story as it arrives first, then decide on its category. She recommends British novelist Jill Dawson as a model for biographical fiction.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Jeffrey Meyers chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath

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

• Jeffrey Meyers adopted Plutarch’s parallel lives approach in Parallel Lives, pairing famous figures to uncover common threads of creativity, ambition and struggle across different fields.
• Jeffrey selected subjects based on their creative genius and discovered connections, whether through direct relationships or shared psychological and artistic patterns.
• Jeffrey structured chapters by interweaving the two biographies chronologically from the start rather than alternating focus between subjects.
• Jeffrey used personal interviews and unpublished sources as most revealing, including conversations with Sylvia Plath’s mother and unpublished manuscripts.
• Jeffrey adjusted his authorial voice when writing about different subjects, recognising that Hitler required a different tone than Sylvia Plath.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Adam Plunkett chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry.

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

• Why Adam Plunkett spent a decade researching Frost’s life, including accessing previously overlooked audio archives of 500 tapes of Frost’s readings and interviews.
• Love and Need blends biography and literary criticism.
• How Adam grounded critical arguments in meticulous examination of source materials.
• Adam explored the ‘love and need dynamic’ central to Frost’s creativity by interpretating the nature of the poet’s closest relationships.
• Adam portrayed Frost’s poetry as having its own life, crafting an object biography to show how the poet lived for his art.
• Why Adam avoided a comprehensive cradle-to-grave structure.

In this special episode of Biographers in Conversation for the National Biography Award, Dr Micaela Sahhar chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting the award-winning Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family.

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

• Micaela Sahhar won the 2026 Michael Crouch Award for a Debut Work for Find Me at the Jaffa Gate.
• The award judges remarked: ‘Micaela Sahhar’s distinctive voice moves effortlessly between the intimate, the comic, the academic and the poetic, transforming a family archive into a profound meditation on history, belonging and loss.’
• ‘Here, history is not a fixed record but a living inheritance, continually reclaimed and reinterpreted’, the judges added. ‘Expansive in vision, innovative in form, and profound in its contribution to contemporary life writing, Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is a work of rare achievement.’
• With many primary sources destroyed in the 1948 Nakba, Micaela learned to read absence as a form of evidence, drawing on object memory, fragments, photographs, and ephemeral archives to reconstruct what official records could not.
• Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is structured as a 48-entry encyclopaedia spanning four generations of Michael’s Palestinian family, from the streets of Jerusalem and Bethlehem to the Palestinian community of Melbourne.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Ramie Targoff chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Shakespeare’s Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance.

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

• Ramie Targoff selected four female contemporaries of Shakespeare who were publicly recognised writers to challenge Virginia Woolf’s claim that ‘Judith Shakespeare could not exist’.
• Why Ramie opened with Virginia Woolf and Judith Shakespeare to confront the powerful but mistaken narrative that there were no female authors in Shakespeare’s England.
• Ramie chose female authors who crafted psalms, poetry, tragedy and diaries to showcase the breadth of Renaissance women’s writing.
• Ramie initially planned four separate mini biographies but shifted to an intertwined collective biography when she realised the women’s lives and networks overlapped.​
• How Ramie braided the women’s stories to craft a biography that reads like a novel but avoids veering into fiction.
• Why Ramie treated letters, diaries and memoirs as the richest sources, privileging the women’s own voices wherever they survived.
• How Ramie retraced the women’s footsteps by visiting homes, castles, churches and landscapes to evoke their lived environments.
• How Ramie marked speculative moments for readers, explaining what is known, what is guessed, and how gaps in the record shaped her interpretations.

In this special episode of Biographers in Conversation for the 2026 National Biography Award, Dr Helen Ennis chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Max Dupain: A Portrait.

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

• Helen Ennis received the prestigious 2026 National Biography Award for Max Dupain: A Portrait, the biography of Max Dupain, the most influential photographer of the 20th century.
• The award judges remarked: ‘Max Dupain: A Portrait was chosen for this year’s National Biography Award as an exceptional example of the biographer’s craft. Elegantly structured and written, it weaves Dupain’s life and work into a complex whole.’
• ‘Interspersed microchapters accompanying carefully curated images illuminate not only the range and originality of his photography but also aspects of his character’, the judges added.
• ‘As biographer, Helen Ennis is present but never obtrusive, questioning and interpreting while remaining non-judgmental.’
• ‘This biography of a major 20th-century Australian photographer will be read long into the 21st.’

In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Robert Dessaix chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Chameleon: A Memoir of Art, Travel, Ideas and Love.

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

• Chameleon was shortlisted for the 2026 National Biography Award, with judges calling it ‘vintage Dessaix’ and praising its ‘dazzling display of erudition’.
• Chameleon takes its title from the idea that a chameleon changes colour on the surface while staying essentially the same underneath, mirroring how Dessaix ‘blended’ into each era's doctrines while something stubbornly himself remained.
• At 80, Dessaix describes his head as an ants' nest, alive with tiny scurrying thoughts, and calls memoir the perfect genre for playing in the gap between what everyone has taken you to be and who you in reality are.
• He addresses his naive younger self by his adoptive name, Thomas Robert Jones, and argues by text with his acerbic friend Niall, who may be his alter ego.
• Dessaix admits he rearranges the actual sequence of events, placing India before hospital rather than after, because truth for him sits elsewhere than strict chronology, and seducing the reader with a work of art matters more than accuracy.
• He aimed for a voice that ‘rattles on’ like a companion on a walk rather than a lecture, echoing the Byron epigraph he quotes from Don Juan.
• Rather than a tidy resolution, he closes the book with a chapter called The Green Room, insisting that art and a life are never truly finished.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Sophia Lambton chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about The Callas Imprint: A Centennial Biography.

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

• Why the narrative opened with a prologue about Maria Callas’s artistry.
• How exhaustive research revealed Callas’s brilliance and flaws.
• How a detailed calendar of events, letters and performances tracked Callas’s evolving thoughts.
• How Sophia built comprehensive files by transcribing and translating all of Callas’s interviews.
• Why chapter headings include Callas’s own words.
• How Sophia dismantled Callas’s ‘diva stereotype’ and portrayed her human story.