In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Kathryn Heyman chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Circle of Wonders.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

• ‘Circle of Wonders’ is a novel about a group of women who gather in the Blue Mountains to support their friend Ronnie Bloom through the final month of her life.
• ‘Circle of Wonders’ began as a memoir shortly after Kathryn’s sister and mother died in the same month during 2020.
• Ten weeks later, Kathryn decided to write the book as fictional version of the story. It is then that she found the story’s circular, lunar structure.
• Kathryn explains why the story needed multiple voices rather than one: capturing an ‘ensemble’ or ‘choral’ experience of community meant she no longer had the ethical right to tell it as memoir.
• Kathryn reflects on the ethics of writing about real people.
• Drawing on William Faulkner, Kathryn distinguishes facts from emotional truth, arguing that fiction can sometimes reach a more profoundly truthful place than memoir by freeing the writer from strict fidelity to external events.
• The book’s structure mirrors the lunar cycle, with the final breath looping back into the first sentence, reflecting Kathryn’s belief that ‘all time is now’ and every ending is also a beginning.
• Kathryn closes our conversation with advice for writers straddling memoir, biography and fiction: write the story as it arrives first, then decide on its category. She recommends British novelist Jill Dawson as a model for biographical fiction.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Nigel Cameron chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Dr Koop: The Many Lives of the Surgeon General.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

• Why Nigel Cameron opened the narrative with a preface portraying the octogenarian Dr C. Everett Koop.
• Nigel chose the title, The Many Lives of the Surgeon General, to reflect Koop’s multidimensional roles as a paediatric surgeon, public-health crusader, policymaker and complex human being.
• How Nigel translated complex scientific and medical concepts into engaging, novelistic prose.
• How Nigel crafted a kaleidoscopic portrait by balancing Koop’s stern public persona with intimate human stories, family anecdotes and personal vulnerabilities.
• How Nigel drew on his bioethics background to frame Koop’s decisions in terms of moral conviction, public trust and the ethical dimensions of placing science above politics.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Jeffrey Meyers chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

• Jeffrey Meyers adopted Plutarch’s parallel lives approach in Parallel Lives, pairing famous figures to uncover common threads of creativity, ambition and struggle across different fields.
• Jeffrey selected subjects based on their creative genius and discovered connections, whether through direct relationships or shared psychological and artistic patterns.
• Jeffrey structured chapters by interweaving the two biographies chronologically from the start rather than alternating focus between subjects.
• Jeffrey used personal interviews and unpublished sources as most revealing, including conversations with Sylvia Plath’s mother and unpublished manuscripts.
• Jeffrey adjusted his authorial voice when writing about different subjects, recognising that Hitler required a different tone than Sylvia Plath.