In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Robert Dessaix chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Chameleon: A Memoir of Art, Travel, Ideas and Love.

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

• Chameleon was shortlisted for the 2026 National Biography Award, with judges calling it ‘vintage Dessaix’ and praising its ‘dazzling display of erudition’.
• Chameleon takes its title from the idea that a chameleon changes colour on the surface while staying essentially the same underneath, mirroring how Dessaix ‘blended’ into each era's doctrines while something stubbornly himself remained.
• At 80, Dessaix describes his head as an ants' nest, alive with tiny scurrying thoughts, and calls memoir the perfect genre for playing in the gap between what everyone has taken you to be and who you in reality are.
• He addresses his naive younger self by his adoptive name, Thomas Robert Jones, and argues by text with his acerbic friend Niall, who may be his alter ego.
• Dessaix admits he rearranges the actual sequence of events, placing India before hospital rather than after, because truth for him sits elsewhere than strict chronology, and seducing the reader with a work of art matters more than accuracy.
• He aimed for a voice that ‘rattles on’ like a companion on a walk rather than a lecture, echoing the Byron epigraph he quotes from Don Juan.
• Rather than a tidy resolution, he closes the book with a chapter called The Green Room, insisting that art and a life are never truly finished.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Ramie Targoff chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Shakespeare’s Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance.

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

• Ramie Targoff selected four female contemporaries of Shakespeare who were publicly recognised writers to challenge Virginia Woolf’s claim that ‘Judith Shakespeare could not exist’.
• Why Ramie opened with Virginia Woolf and Judith Shakespeare to confront the powerful but mistaken narrative that there were no female authors in Shakespeare’s England.
• Ramie chose female authors who crafted psalms, poetry, tragedy and diaries to showcase the breadth of Renaissance women’s writing.
• Ramie initially planned four separate mini biographies but shifted to an intertwined collective biography when she realised the women’s lives and networks overlapped.​
• How Ramie braided the women’s stories to craft a biography that reads like a novel but avoids veering into fiction.
• Why Ramie treated letters, diaries and memoirs as the richest sources, privileging the women’s own voices wherever they survived.
• How Ramie retraced the women’s footsteps by visiting homes, castles, churches and landscapes to evoke their lived environments.
• How Ramie marked speculative moments for readers, explaining what is known, what is guessed, and how gaps in the record shaped her interpretations.

In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, S. Shakthidharan (Shakthi) chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about his choices while crafting Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath.

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

• Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath centres on the family home Shakthi’s grandmother dismantled piece by piece in Sri Lanka and rebuilt in Western Sydney as an act of willpower amid civil war.
• Shakthi personifies his family’s home as a living presence capable of being both suffocating and liberating, reflecting the complexity of migrant obligation and belonging.
• Shakthi began writing Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath after realising, during the hardest period of his life juggling young children and a dying father, that he was experiencing genuine belonging inside a family for the first time at age 40.
• The title Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath comes from Shakthi’s Hindu wedding ceremony, when facing his gathered community instead of his bride revealed a profound truth about love and connection.
• Each chapter is addressed directly to a key figure in Shakthi’s life, including his mother, partner, father and sons. This creates an intimate space between the first and second person.
• Shakthi shared early drafts of the manuscript with his mother, partner and uncle, incorporating their responses into what ultimately appeared in their respective chapters.
• The memoir closes with Shakthi’s two sons playing on the same porch his great-grandfather once sat on in Sri Lanka. The children were steering an imaginary ship, a symbol of hope and continuity passed to the next generation.