Separate stories podcast: Recent Episodes
ABC Radio
Books and Arts explores the many worlds of performance, writing, music and visual arts, and features interviews with local and international authors and artists.
Five days with a retired concrete engineer in Western Australia in 2006, and it's funny.
The Artistic Director of Bangarra Dance Theatre, Stephen Page, on the 2017 production which told the story of Bennelong, an Eora man who became a conduit between his people and the newly arrived settlers at Sydney Cove.
Krissy Kneen on her latest novel, An Uncertain Grace, which is about taboos around younger and older sexual desires and why jellyfish are important.
Scottish crimewriter Chris Brookmyre reveals what has influenced him, and throws in a song based on one of his novels.
Recorder virtuoso Genevieve Lacey plays for us and talks about the contemporary potential of her ancient instrument.
Tony Jones, the host of the ABC's Q&A program, released his first novel in 2017, which travels between the streets of Sydney, the corridors of Parliament House, and the mountains of Yugoslavia.
Argentine literary star Samanta Schweblin discusses her surreal and unsettling novel Fever Dream.
What happens when you bring together choreographer Wayne McGregor, artist Ólafur Eliasson and musician Jamie XX? An innovative dance piece based on a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer.
Award-winning Melbourne author, Chris Womersley, is back with a novel set in 1673 in France during the plague.
Melbourne based actor, director and playwright Peter Houghton joins us with some surprising favourites on his Top Shelf.
We travel to remote communities in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands of South Australia to find out why these tiny art centres are producing such phenomenal contemporary art.
Michael Rosen follows the famous French author in exile in London after he was sentenced to prison for his vocal support of Alfred Dreyfus.
Through stories of their life and family, Ivan Coyote works fearlessly at the edges of gender, queer and identity politics.
British author Claire Fuller discusses the books, films and music that inspired her to become a writer.
The Museum of Contemporary Art's exhibition (which is now on at the Heide Museum of Contemporary Art in Melbourne) Jenny Watson: the Fabric of Fantasy covers four decades of the artist's work, including work on unconventional fabrics and featuring self-portraits, alter-egos, horses and rockstars.
Across four generations and almost a century, Pachinko tells the story of a Korean family's search for identity.
Crime writers Adrian McKinty and Candice Fox both use police officers as central characters in their fiction. Why and how?
Detective Chief Inspector Gary Jubelin is a senior homicide detective in the NSW police force. There's nothing fictional about his working life or the crimes he investigates.
A conversation with British American writer Tracy Chevalier about her recent books New Boy, a retelling of Shakespeare's tragedy Othello, and At the Edge of the Orchard, which is set in 19th century America and tells the story of a dysfunctional pioneer family.
A recently released collection of stories from the great American author show him in a new light; the flappers and the champagne are gone, and in their place are dark stories of war, sex and suicide.
A super fan and literary academic gets up close and personal with thriller writer, Lee Child.
Colson Whitehead on his brutal, playful, novel of slavery, The Underground Railroad, which won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
A letter that the late satirist John Clarke penned to his younger self, as he listened to some traditional Scottish airs, performed by Genevieve Lacey and James Crabb.
d UK comedians Jenny Éclair and James Veitch told us about their 2017 Melbourne International Comedy Festival shows.
Paul Robeson was one of the most famous actors in Hollywood. What brought his glittering career undone?
Not an animal or a plant, a comprehensive show of Vernon Ah Kee's work from 2017, tackles racism in Australia head on.
The evolution of feelings in Western literature since the medieval period. How did it go from action to interiority?
Academic and writer Jacqueline Rose on why it’s time for a scandalous, untamed feminism, in conversation at the 2017 Sydney Writers' Festival.
Arts Project Australia is an arts organisation for people who are intellectually disabled. One of their 2017 shows was Girt By Sea, Michael Cathcart visited the studio to meet some of the artists.
Randa Abdel-Fattah, author of When Michael Met Mina, reveals her love for The Babysitters Club and why the power of stories and diverse representation in Australian literature matters more than ever.
Naomi Shihab Nye grew up between the Midwest and the West Bank, and her poetry makes connections between places and people that seem beyond connection.
South Australian artist Christopher Orchard was the feature artist in the 2017 South Australian Living Artists Festival.
The mutability of clouds has inspired generations of poets and artists. Richard Hamblyn traces the cultural significance of clouds.
What could be more timely than thoughtful fiction about what it means to be a refugee in America?
Author Bernadette Brennan on the first full length literary study of acclaimed Australian author, Helen Garner.
In a Currency Press essay, Andrew Bovell reflects on his long career as a playwright and screenwriter.
The maverick Australian director Barrie Kosky on his opera of George Frideric Handel's Saul, which was the centrepiece of the 2017 Adelaide Festival.
The life story of a gay man in Ireland, stretching from the end of the Second World War to the 1995 Referendum on Marriage Equality.
Alanna Mitchell's stage adaptation of her best-selling novel about the health of the world's oceans - Sea Sick.
In 1987 playwright Wong Souk Yee was arrested and accused of plotting to undermine the government. Why and what happened next?
Smack bang between commercial shopfronts, there’s often a little stairwell that can lead up to an art deco or Victorian building – once fabulous but now either disused or completely unrecognisable.
Why do some houses endure, while others fade away. What effect does a good house have on our architectural legacy, and how does an innovative house shape the way we build our houses and urban spaces.
A love of beautiful, old-fashioned lettering led Rajiv Surendra to set up a business in bespoke calligraphy.