In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Sara Fitzgerald chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T. S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime.

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

• How the secret letters T.S. Eliot wrote to Emily Hale revealed an intimate 27-year correspondence (1930-1957) that confirmed Hale’s profound influence on his poetry.
• How Eliot’s destruction of Emily’s letters to him silenced her voice.
• Despite being relegated to footnote status in Eliot’s life, Emily taught drama at prominent colleges such as Smith College, acted in amateur theatre with future Broadway stars and maintained a rich independent life.
• How Eliot’s secret letter to Harvard revealed a nasty counter-narrative. Eliot’s pre-emptive statement dismissed his relationship.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Theodore Ell chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Lebanon Days: Memories of an ancient land through economic meltdown, a revolution of hope and surviving the 2020 Beirut explosion.

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

• Theodore Ell reveals how the blended style of Lebanon Days—weaving memoir, cultural history, travel writing, journalism and political analysis—was an organic response to the multi-layered forces he witnessed in Lebanon between 2018 and 2021.
• Theo explores the five-part chronological structure of Lebanon Days and the key pivot points that shaped it: arriving as a newcomer, the 2019 revolution, COVID lockdown, the 2020 port explosion, and a sombre farewell.
• Theo explains the counterintuitive decision to draft Lebanon Days backwards, beginning with the explosion and working towards his arrival, as an archaeological method for keeping Lebanon, rather than himself, at the centre of the narrative.
• Theo introduces his forthcoming authorised biography of the acclaimed poet Les Murray, This Country Is My Mind. It involves studying 65 boxes of archival material he is studying at the National Library of Australia and interviews with over 50 people.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Deborah FitzGerald chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Her Sunburnt Country: The Extraordinary Literary Life of Dorothea Mackellar.

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

• Why Dorothea Mackellar crafted her iconic poem: ‘I Love a Sunburnt Country’.
• Deborah FitzGerald’s inspiration for crafting Her Sunburnt Country.
• Why Mackellar was invisible in the historical record, despite the enduring fame of her poem.
• How Deborah balanced Mackellar’s literary life with her human story.
• How Deborah reconciled Mackellar’s contradictions.
• How Deborah balanced imaginative storytelling and historical rigour.
• The contemporary relevance of Dorothea Mackellar’s life story.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Lucy Jane Sussex and Megan Brown chat with Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Outrageous Fortunes: The Adventures of Mary Fortune, Crime-Writer, and Her Criminal Son George

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

• Outrageous Fortunes was co-authored after a 25-year conversation, combining Lucy’s 35 years of research with Megan’s PhD research.
• Lucy and Megan employed a revisionist approach to correct the record about Mary Fortune, arguing that women’s voices are undervalued.
• Why Mary Fortune’s and George Fortune’s stories were blended as ‘one story’.
• How Lucy and Megan employed ‘sideways research’ when direct evidence was missing.
• How Lucy and Megan resisted dramatisation and fictionalisation, instead relying on contemporary newspaper accounts and court records.
• How Lucy and Megan borrowed the title Outrageous Fortunes from Shakespeare to reflect scandalous lives and the Victorian ‘topsy-turvy’ puzzle metaphor that shaped their narrative structure

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dava Sobel chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science.

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

• Dava Sobel used the periodic table as the structural framework, with each chapter keyed to an element that represents a period of Curie’s life or scientific work.
• Dava selected the title The Elements of Marie Curie to emphasise how the chemical elements shaped her discoveries and personal life.
• Dava wrote in the first person as Marie Curie, translating her letters into English though preserving her voice and perspective to create an immersive narrative.
• Dava traced the path for women in science by highlighting generations of women mentored by Curie, showing her enduring influence beyond her own research.
• Dava created a chemical chronology that parallels scientific discoveries with biography, such as linking radium extraction to gruelling lab work.
• Dava ended with ‘Carbon’ to reflect on Curie’s legacy and the organic, interconnected nature of her scientific and humanitarian impact.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Jacqueline Kent chats with Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Inconvenient Women: Australian Radical Writers 1900-1970.

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

• Jacqueline Kent traces the ‘missing generation’ of Australian radical women writers, who bridged the gap between suffragists and second-wave feminism.
• These writers were politically active and formally transgressive, challenging norms in both their activism and subject matter.
• The collective-biography form enables Kent to show how these women intersected through organisations like the Fellowship of Australian Writers, the Society of Women Writers and the Commonwealth Literary Fund, creating fragile but vital support networks in otherwise isolated domestic lives.
• Kent insists these ‘inconvenient women’ speak directly to the present, reminding listeners that structural sexism, economic inequality and workplace predation persist, even as a new generation of women refuses to accept discrimination as the norm.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Mark Hussey chats with Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel.

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

• Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel was published exactly 100 years after Virginia Woolf’s famous novel appeared.
• Why Mark Hussey portrayed Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway as a living subject with its own life story.
• Why Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel is considered as an object biography.
• Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel follows Woolf’s story chronologically from its first creative stirrings in her diary through conception, writing, drafting, revision, publication, early reviews, and onward throughout its extraordinary afterlife, which continues today.
• How Woolf’s earliest notes from 6 October 1922 reveal she knew from the outset that ‘all must converge upon the party at the end’.
• How Mrs Dalloway inspired creative works such as novels set on a single day, films, an opera, plays, cartoons, memes, tattoos and songs.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Nicholas Boggs chats with Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Baldwin: A Love Story.

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

• Why Nicholas Boggs structured the biography around Baldwin’s four great loves rather than chronology.
• Baldwin’s frank acknowledgment that his novels were driven by autobiographical impulses gave Boggs rare biographical licence to connect fiction to life without making reductive one-to-one correlations between characters and real people.​
• Retracing Baldwin’s footsteps to Corsica, Istanbul and the south of France proved essential for capturing sensory details like the smell of maquis plants that connected biographer to subject across time.
• Boggs challenged the prevailing image of Baldwin as either a civil rights icon or a tragic figure, instead revealing he died at 63 surrounded by his great loves.
• The biography’s epilogue deliberately intervenes in Baldwin’s posthumous reputation, joining a chorus of scholars and writers working to dismantle the narrative of creative decline that attached itself to Baldwin’s later years, reorienting readers toward the enduring power of his voice and vision.​