Last year, Bryan Brown interviewed Sam Neill at the Festival. This year, it was Bryan’s turn in the hot seat as Sam interviewed him about his gripping new crime novel, The Drowning. Bryan is one of the most recognisable faces on our screens with more than 80 film and television projects to his name. This sensational new thriller with his characteristic laconic style – humorous, tough and suspenseful – confirms his place as one of the great Australian storytellers.

This episode was recorded live in May at the 2024 Sydney Writers’ Festival.

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Going deep into the historical past, Lauren Groff (The Vaster Wilds, Matrix) and Francesca de Tores (Saltblood) create memorable heroines, real and imaginary, whose stories have not been told.

Their portrayals of ordinary women doing extraordinary things – a girl escaping alone into the wilderness, a pirate on the high seas – are richly detailed and vividly alive. Coming out of hiding into our imaginations, these heroines are so fierce they jump off the page. Join Lauren and Francesca in conversation with novelist and scholar Sophie Gee.

This episode was recorded live in May at the 2024 Sydney Writers’ Festival.

If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and follow our channel. 

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Join two of the most admired writers in Australia today, Booker Prize–winning Richard Flanagan and Miles Franklin–winning Anna Funder as they discuss writing in the margins between fiction and non-fiction, history and memoir, personal and public.

Historian Clare Wright leads this conversation, examining their genre-bending masterpieces. Through a hypnotic melding of dream, history, science and memory, Question 7 traces the ripples of history through Richard’s own family and is described by Anna as holding “a life between its covers”. Wifedom is Anna’s “counterfiction”, an attempt to write Eileen O'Shaughnessy, George Orwell’s first wife, back into the narrative from which history has so carefully excised her. Not only a New York Times Notable Book of 2023, Wifedom also described by Geraldine Brooks as “Simply, a masterpiece”.

Redefine genre with Richard and Anna as they discuss the craft of writing, the parts of themselves left excavated on the page and the consequences of the choices we make.

This episode was recorded live in May at the 2024 Sydney Writers’ Festival.

If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and follow our channel. 

Sydney Writers’ Festival podcasts are available on all major podcast platforms. 

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While everyone has dirty laundry in their lives, not everyone will choose to air theirs publicly.

Whether on social media, in written memoir, public speaking or on television, how can sharing the ‘self’ when the story touches on family and community, still be navigated ethically? What are the consequences and ramifications of bringing the personal into the public realm? Join writers Benjamin Law, Rhys Nicholson and Amy Thunig as they unpack the fallout on the other side of publication, with host George Haddad.

This episode was recorded live in May at the 2024 Sydney Writers’ Festival.

If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and follow our channel. 

Sydney Writers’ Festival podcasts are available on all major podcast platforms. 

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Sean Turnell spent almost two years in Myanmar’s terrifying Insein Prison, accused of being a spy. Ma Thida was also incarcerated there, where, denied medical treatment, she came very close to dying.

How did they survive? What hope do these important players in Myanmar’s government and politics hold for the return of democracy three years after the military seized power in a coup? In conversation with Catherine Renshaw.

This event was presented in partnership with PEN Sydney and recorded live in May at the 2024 Sydney Writers' Festival. 

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Melissa Lucashenko describes her latest novel, Edenglassie, as her “big book” – a multigenerational epic that torches Queensland’s colonial myths and reimagines Australia’s future.

Set in Brisbane and rivalling the romances of Too Much Lip and Mullumbimby, two parallel love stories play out two centuries apart. In both the colonial era and the present day, no one knows how far legacies will reach into modern lives.

Sit down with this celebrated author as she is joined on stage by ABC RN’s Kate Evans to discuss her critically acclaimed novel, described by The Weekend Australian as being “as heart-warming as it is heart-breaking”.

This episode was recorded live in May at the 2024 Sydney Writers’ Festival.

If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and follow our channel. 

Sydney Writers’ Festival podcasts are available on all major podcast platforms. 

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Following broadcaster and author Julia Baird’s multi-award-winning international bestseller, Phosphorescence, comes a beautiful and timely exploration of that most mysterious but necessary human quality: grace.

Bright Shining: How grace changes everything asks what grace looks like today, how we recognise it, nurture it within ourselves and express it. For Julia, grace can be found by being kinder, bigger and better with each other.

Sit down with Julia to discuss this luminous work, which The Guardian described as “a book the world needs now”. In conversation with journalist Jacqueline Maley.

This episode was recorded live in May at the 2024 Sydney Writers’ Festival.

If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and follow our channel. 

Sydney Writers’ Festival podcasts are available on all major podcast platforms. 

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As conflict plays out across an unnamed region, the protagonist in Parramatta Laureate of Literature Yumna Kassab’s Politica imagines how she will later narrate her experiences: “We hadn’t spoken for years but then the war broke out...” 

Sharing difficult stories is also at the heart of Miles Franklin Award winner Shankari Chandran’s Safe Haven, which follows a refugee threatened with deportation when she speaks out for other detainees. Sit down with Yumna and Shankari as they discuss their poignant and timely novels, which ask how, if possible, we can measure the cost of war and what lengths we will go to in the search for safety. With host Ashley Hay.

This episode was recorded live at the 2024 Sydney Writers’ Festival. 

If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and follow our channel.  

Sydney Writers’ Festival podcasts are available on all major podcast platforms.  

After more? Follow Sydney Writers’ Festival on social media: 
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After smash-hit Fates and Furies, the modern-day marriage story that was Barack Obama’s book of the year in 2015, Lauren Groff’s novels have looked to the past to understand the present. 

Her latest historical novel, The Vaster Wilds, is set on the edge of the New World at an unnamed British settlement in the Americas. Fleeing violence, disease and starvation, a servant girl enters the wilderness alone. This spirited survivalist story has been critically acclaimed as “exhilarating” (The Guardian), “visionary” (The Observer) and “timeless” (The Times).

Join Lauren and host Melanie Kembrey as they explore this prophetic novel, which encapsulates the story of America in miniature.

This episode was recorded live at the 2024 Sydney Writers’ Festival. 

If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and follow our channel.  

Sydney Writers’ Festival podcasts are available on all major podcast platforms.  

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Join Richard Flanagan as he discusses this hypnotic, genre-defying new book which entwines memoir, biography, autofiction and history through a daisy chain of stories both intimate and collective.

Opening with his father as a prisoner of war, the book leads readers through a literary love affair into nuclear physics of the 1930s and 40s and finally towards a young Richard fighting for his life in Tasmanian river rapids in a rumination on life’s choices and their intergenerational chain reactions. Richard speaks with Kerry O’Brien.

This episode was recorded live at the 2024 Sydney Writers’ Festival. 

If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and follow our channel.  

Sydney Writers’ Festival podcasts are available on all major podcast platforms.  

After more? Follow Sydney Writers’ Festival on social media: 
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Social change is driven by conversation, in sharing ideas, and translating those ideas for audiences who don’t agree or understand what is at stake.

For many First Nations writers and journalists, this has been a huge priority over the last year, in particular, and one that comes with a cost. In a conversation with legendary truth-tellers, find out what sustains them to keep on going in the face of profound challenges. With Larissa Behrendt, Tony Birch, Narelda Jacobs and Amy Thunig.

This episode was recorded live at the 2024 Sydney Writers’ Festival. 

If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and follow our channel.  

Sydney Writers’ Festival podcasts are available on all major podcast platforms.  

After more? Follow Sydney Writers’ Festival on social media: 
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