Sydney Writers' Festival

Mar 04 2025 100 ep. 54 mins 2.6k
Sydney Writers' Festival Podcast artwork

Australia's largest celebration of literature, stories and ideas. Bringing together the world's best authors, leading public intellectuals, scientists, journalists and more. Subscribe to our channel for new releases.

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Bruce Pascoe and Lyn Harwood: Black Duck: A Year at Yumburra

Mar 04 2025 50 mins  
Bruce Pascoe and Lyn Harwood invite us onto the Country they call home in Black Duck: A Year at Yumburra, reflecting on life after publishing Dark Emu. In the aftermath of devastating bushfires in north-eastern Victoria, the couple rebuilt their farm. Here, they run the Aboriginal social enterprise Black Duck Foods, committed to traditional food-growing processes that care for Coun

How We Learn to Read with Sally Rippin

Feb 26 2025 51 mins  
We all know the importance of literacy for school and life, but what happens when, despite all your efforts, reading just doesn’t “click”? Sally Rippin, the Australian Children’s Laureate and author of the book Wild Things: How we learn to read and what happens if we don’t is joined by journalist and Dyslexia advocate, Cat Rodie, in an exploration of l

First Fictions

Feb 18 2025 50 mins  
Jennifer Croft, Bri Lee and Louise Milligan have earned widespread acclaim in the realms of translation, non-fiction and investigative journalism, respectively. Now, these authors are branching out into novels for the first time in their illustrious careers, revisiting themes in their previous writing to create stunning, gripping and beguiling works of the imagination. Separate fac

Literary Legends

Feb 12 2025 59 mins  
Explore the literary histories of Charmian Clift, Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower. Following her biography The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift, Nadia Wheatley contributed the afterword to The End of the Morning, Clift’s final manuscript, which was recently published more than 50 years after her death. Literary scholar Brigitta Olubas (Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Li

SWF Great Debate: Artificial Intelligence is Better Than the Real Thing

Feb 03 2025 68 mins  
Humankind stands at a crossroads: will artificial intelligence make us superhumanly productive, liberating us from life’s most mundane tasks? Or have we opened Pandora’s box, unleashing sentient technology that will eventually destroy us? In a colossal contest of persuasion and wit, two teams of our best and brightest debate whether artificial intelligence is better th

Robyn Davidson: Unfinished Woman

Jan 29 2025 46 mins  
Robyn Davidson once described Unfinished Woman as an “infinite book”. “I feel absolutely that I have to write it and absolutely that I can’t write it.” Twenty-five years in the making, this unforgettable memoir charts her expeditions since crossing the Gibson Desert with camels –  the subject of her debut, Tracks, which her then-landlord, Doris

The Austen Formula

Jan 28 2025 54 mins  
Some consider Pride and Prejudice the first romantic comedy, with Jane Austen having set the ground rules for others to follow. Certainly, with its witty heroine and enemies-to-lovers plotting, Pride and Prejudice has created many of the tropes we continue to see in rom-coms today. YA authors Kate and Angourie Rice (Stuck up and Stupid), Sophie Gonzales (The Perfect Guy Doesn't Exi

David Wengrow: The Dawn of Everything

Jan 22 2025 52 mins  
What kind of world could we create if we stopped believing inequality is the price of progress? Archaeology professor David Wengrow’s groundbreaking book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, co-authored with the late David Graeber, overturns the theories of Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens), Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel) and Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now)

Your Favourites’ Favourites: Tony Birch and Graham Akhurst

Jan 20 2025 50 mins  
In Your Favourites’ Favourites, our most loved writers introduce one of their favourite authors. Acclaimed Women & Children author Tony Birch sits down with debut writer Graham Akhurst, a Fulbright Scholar who drafted his YA novel, Borderland, while studying in renowned writing program at Hunter College in New York City. This gripping coming-of-age story follows a city-bo

Hedley Thomas: How to Catch a Killer

Jan 15 2025 52 mins  
If you thought you knew the backstory of The Teacher's Pet, the gripping whodunnit podcast downloaded by over 80 million listeners, think again. Two-time Gold Walkley Award–winning investigative journalist Hedley Thomas’ book takes readers behind the scenes of the podcast investigation with a blow-by-blow account of one of the most intriguing and enduring murder mysteri