Sydney Writers' Festival

In her memoir Speaking Up, former president of the Human Rights Commission Gillian Triggs writes candidly about the relentless political pressure and media scrutiny she endured as a result of telling the truth about children in offshore detention. Joined by Clare Wright, she offers her insights into Australian democracy, human rights and the law, and expands on the passionately argued memoir that reads as a clarion call to everyone who believes in a fairer world. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bri Lee entered a Queensland court as a bright-eyed judge’s associate. Two years later she returned as a sexual assault complainant in her own case. Helen Garner praises Bri’s award-winning account of her journey through the legal system, Eggshell Skull, as “scorching, self-scouring... a young woman finds her steel and learns to wield it”. Discussing her eloquent memoir with Guardian Australia’s Editor Lenore Taylor, Bri discusses what it means to be a woman in our justice system, taking control of her own story, and the rife inequality each step of the way. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Kristen Roupenian became an instant literary sensation when her short story, 'Cat Person', became the most shared piece of fiction in The New Yorker website’s history. Her highly anticipated debut, You Know You Want This, picks up where 'Cat Person' left off, with a collection of funny, furious and explicit stories exploring the complex connections between gender, sex and power. Hear fiction’s most audacious new voice in conversation with Estelle Tang. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In Advice for Future Corpses (And Those Who Love Them), writer and palliative care nurse Sallie Tisdale asks what the living can learn by looking death in the eye. By turns philosophical and pragmatic, this is a “book on how to die that is also a blessedly saccharine-free guide for how to live", according to The New York Times, which hailed it as a Top Book of 2018. Sallie shares her insights into death and dying in conversation with ABC Radio Sydney’s James Valentine. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Caro Llewellyn was living her dream life in her adopted home of New York, directing an international literary festival for Salman Rushdie and the human rights organisation, PEN. Then one day, running in Central Park, she lost all sensation in her legs. Two days later, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. A former artistic director of Sydney Writers’ Festival, Caro joins Susan Wyndham to discuss Diving into Glass, the memoir that Janet Malcolm calls “unpredictable and consistently exhilarating” and Annie Proulx praises as “compelling, portentous [and] packed with shocks of recognition”. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Fatima Bhutto (The Runaways) and Elaine Castillo (America Is Not the Heart) have both supercharged literature with their nuanced, layered and passionate responses to questions of belonging. They join Roanna Gonsalves to discuss how the exploration of geopolitics and history in their work – in a global context, and closer to home – can be unwittingly reduced to ‘identity’, even though it’s far more complex and interesting than that. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Curiosity Lecture | Melanie Joosten: On Big Sisters

Curiosity Lecture | Lynne Kelly: On How Memory Training Changed My Thinking

Curiosity Lecture | Karen Pickering: On Shark Week

Dreams of Her Real Self: Writers on Helen Garner

Di Morrissey: A Distant Journey

Hell and High Water

Crimes of the Father

Curiosity Lecture | Lucy Clark: On Competition

Curiosity Lecture | Kim Mahood: On Stilettos and Salt Lakes