An Evening with Susan Wyndham and Susan Lever
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Join authors Susan Wyndham and Susan Lever as they chat about their most recent biographies and the art of writing abut prominent historical figures.
About Woman in the Watchtower by Susan Wyndham:
Elizabeth Harrower wrote some of the most intense, original and highly regarded novels of the twentieth century. Then she abruptly stopped writing in the 1970s and became one of the most puzzling mysteries of Australian literature. Why didn’t she continue? Harrower gave evasive answers to friends and interviewers, and only since her death in 2020 has a deeper search been possible.
In this definitive biography, renowned journalist and writer Susan Wyndham grapples with the elusive Harrower. She immerses us in the author’s tumultuous family, her complex friendships with Patrick White, Christina Stead, Kylie Tennant and Shirley Hazzard, and her timeless probing of the human spirit in five remarkable novels.
Drawing on time spent with Harrower, revealing analysis of her fiction and new research, Wyndham unmasks a literary legend.
About A.D. Hope by Susan Lever:
The first biography of A.D. Hope, one of Australia's greatest poets.
Alec Derwent Hope (1907–2000) was one of Australia's most acclaimed poets. His first collection was not published until he was forty-eight years old, mainly because of its sexual nature and fears of censorship, but its release cemented his reputation.
This biography recounts Hope's early life in rural Tasmania, the influences of his education at Sydney and Oxford universities, his notoriety as a critic and wit in the 1940s and '50s, and his career as a poet and academic, which placed him at the centre of Australian literary life for over fifty years.
Drawing on Hope's poetry, notebooks and surviving letters to friends, Susan Lever examines the many contrasts and contradictions of Hope's life: a polite, softly spoken man with a savage wit; a professor who refused to confine himself to the narrow specialisations of the academy; an emotionally complex intellectual who lived an outwardly conventional life in ordinary Australian suburbia; a poet responding to the major cultural shifts of the twentieth century and concluding that the contemporary poet's task was the renewal of tradition.
About the Authors:
Susan Wyndham is a writer and journalist who has been New York correspondent for The Australian newspaper and literary editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. Her most recent book, co-edited with Brigitta Olubas, is Hazzard and Harrower: The letters. In 2024 she was awarded a National Library of Australia Fellowship to research the life of Elizabeth Harrower.
Susan Lever taught literature for many years at the University of New South Wales, Canberra, and she is the author and editor of several books, including The Oxford Book of Australian Women's Verse and A Question of Commitment: Australian Literature in the Twenty Years after the War.
Susan and Susan will be in conversation with Geordie Williamson. Geordie Williamson has been chief literary critic of The Australian since 2008. He is publisher of the Picador imprint at Pan Macmillan, a former editor of Island Magazine and Best Australian Essays, and author of The Burning Library, a collection of essays on neglected figures from Australian literature. He lives in Hobart.
Join Susan, Susan, and Geordie at the Afterword Cafe.