Biographers in Conversation

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Nigel Hamilton chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Lincoln vs. Davis: The War of the Presidents.

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

Lincoln vs. Davis is the first dual biography to examine how Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis fought each other as presidents and commanders-in-chief of their respective forces, the Union and the Confederacy, during the American Civil War.

Lincoln and Davis coincidentally began train journeys to their Presidential inaugurations on the same day.

By framing emancipation as a military order during a national emergency rather than civilian legislation, Lincoln legally freed 3.5 million enslaved people and ensured no European power would ever recognise the Confederacy, dooming Davis’s rebellion.

Frustrated that historians have covered up crucial details and failed to explain why Lincoln delayed emancipation for nearly two years, Nigel Hamilton crafted Lincoln vs. Davis to correct the historical record, practising what he refers to as ‘biography as corrective’.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Zachary Leader chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker.

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

Richard Ellmann’s biography of the novelist James Joyce is considered the greatest literary biography of the 20th century.

Why Zachary Leader was inspired to craft Ellmann’s Joyce.

Why Ellmann’s Joyce is structured in two sections: a chronological life of Richard Ellmann followed by a thematic ‘making of James Joyce’s biography’ section.

Why Zachary opened the narrative with a chapter defending literary biography.

Why Zachary portrayed Ellmann’s James Joyce as both scholarship and art, foregrounding Ellmann’s narrative craft, wit and realist virtues.

Why Ellmann’s Joyce is a practical masterclass in biography.

In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Micaela Sahhar chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family.

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

The death of Micaela Sahhar’s grandmother’s last surviving sister created a sense of urgency for Micaela to capture her Palestinian family’s stories before they slipped beyond living memory.

With many primary sources destroyed in the 1948 Nakba, Micaela learned to read absence as a form of evidence, drawing on object memory, fragments, photographs, and ephemeral archives to reconstruct what official records could not.

Micaela’s grandfather’s late-life oral history tapes were a vital source of historical and family information. They looped between present and past, between stories and digressions and became a structural model for the encyclopaedic, non-linear form of Find Me at the Jaffa Gate.

In 2023, Micaela visited Jerusalem to retrace her family’s footsteps through the Old City. She recalls that walking the actual terrain, up hills, distances and ordinary neighbourhoods, brought a present-tense vividness to the story.

Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is structured as a 48-entry encyclopaedia spanning four generations of Micaela’s Palestinian family, from the streets of Jerusalem and Bethlehem to the Palestinian community of Melbourne.

In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Professor Karen Fang chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Background Artist: The Life and Work of Tyrus Wong.

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

Karen Fang explains why only a full-length biography could do justice to Tyrus Wong’s 106-year life that encompassed his achievements across fine art, animation, Hollywood storyboarding, greeting cards and kite-making.

Karen reveals that the title Background Artist is Tyrus Wong’s Disney credit in the original 1942 release of the movie Bambi.

Among the most revealing archival discoveries was Tyrus Wong’s personal correspondence that showed a wickedly funny, warm and creatively restless person that no formal interview could have captured.

Karen reveals how Tyrus Wong’s signature visual style, rooted in Chinese brush painting technique and aesthetic heritage, transformed racial difference from a liability into an artistic asset, enabling him to succeed in a society that otherwise offered very little opportunity to Chinese Americans.

The closing passages of Background Artist tie together the themes of visibility, immigration and artistic legacy, ending with the line Karen says came directly from her conversations with Tyrus Wong’s daughters: ‘Tyrus was always simply an artist.’

In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, award-winning author Dr Debra Adelaide chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting When I Am Sixty-Four.

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

When I Am Sixty-Four is a tender, poignant story based on Debra Adelaide’s lifelong friendship with the award-winning author, Gabrielle Carey.

When I Am Sixty-Four began not as a planned book but as a single vivid memory that arrived unbidden while she was working on another project; it simply refused to let go.

A work of extraordinary depth and grace, When I Am Sixty-Four is crafted as autofiction, a hybrid genre that blurs the line between fiction and autobiography.

Debra defines autofiction as writing memoir using the tools of narrative fiction, shaping, rearranging, condensing, and inventing to reach for a broader emotional truth.

Debra explains her decision not to name Gabrielle or anyone else in the book, wanting readers to bring their own experiences of loving someone in despair to the narrative.

Debra describes the story’s mosaic structure of vignettes as entirely instinctive. The final tragic months of her friend’s life provide a loose chronological spine, while memories from their 50 years of shared history were weaved in. 

The story’s dark humour, Debra explains, was both an authentic expression of who Gabrielle Carey was, a woman with an extraordinary laugh, and a deliberate way of honouring her.