Books and Arts explores the many worlds of performance, writing, music and visual arts, and features interviews with local and international authors and artists.
Latest episodes
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13 min
2017 Miles Franklin Award Winner: Josephine Wilson's novel Extinctions
Five days with a retired concrete engineer in Western Australia in 2006, and it's funny.
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14 min
Stephen Page on Bangarra's Bennelong
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…
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25 min
Krissy Kneen: An Uncertain Grace
Krissy Kneen on her latest novel, An Uncertain Grace, which is about taboos around younger and older sexual desires and why jellyfish are important.
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8 min
Top Shelf: Chris Brookmyre
Scottish crimewriter Chris Brookmyre reveals what has influenced him, and throws in a song based on one of his novels.
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12 min
The wonders of the recorder
Recorder virtuoso Genevieve Lacey plays for us and talks about the contemporary potential of her ancient instrument.
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31 min
Tony Jones's debut novel, The Twentieth Man
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 o…
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16 min
Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin
Argentine literary star Samanta Schweblin discusses her surreal and unsettling novel Fever Dream.
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4 min
Top Shelf: crime writer Michael Robotham
What works does Michael Robotham reach for on his Top Shelf?
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13 min
Tree of Codes by Wayne McGregor
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.
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20 min
Chris Womersley on his new novel City of Crows
Award-winning Melbourne author, Chris Womersley, is back with a novel set in 1673 in France during the plague.
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6 min
Top Shelf: Peter Houghton
Melbourne based actor, director and playwright Peter Houghton joins us with some surprising favourites on his Top Shelf.
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16 min
Why is the art from the APY lands so good?
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 contempor…
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29 min
The Disappearance of Émile Zola
Michael Rosen follows the famous French author in exile in London after he was sentenced to prison for his vocal support of Alfred Dreyfus.
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15 min
Canadian storyteller and writer Ivan Coyote
Through stories of their life and family, Ivan Coyote works fearlessly at the edges of gender, queer and identity politics.
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5 min
Top Shelf: Claire Fuller
British author Claire Fuller discusses the books, films and music that inspired her to become a writer.
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15 min
Jenny Watson: suburban girl to feminist punk
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 ar…
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17 min
Min Jin Lee: Pachinko
Across four generations and almost a century, Pachinko tells the story of a Korean family's search for identity.
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19 min
Walking the fictional beat
Crime writers Adrian McKinty and Candice Fox both use police officers as central characters in their fiction. Why and how?
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30 min
Entertaining Crime? The view from a working detective and a former police officer
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.
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54 min
Tracy Chevalier at the Melbourne Writers Festival
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 s…