I’m a biographer endlessly fascinated by the multiplicity of choices biographers make when crafting a life story. When you read a biography, do you feel like you’re in the story living the biographical subject’s life, feeling what they’re feeling and seeing what they’re seeing? To stimulate your imagination this way, biographers make hundreds of decisions about how they research and write their […]
Father’s Day is just around the corner, and it’s time to show your dad how much you love and appreciate him. Finding the perfect gift for your dad can be a daunting task, especially if you’re looking for something unique. If he is someone who enjoys stories of perseverance, triumph and making a difference, we […]
Arthur Akuien Chol: A Life Fighting for my people is my latest book, the life story of Arthur Akuien Chol, South Sudan’s first Minister of Finance after the country gained independence in July 2011. It chronicles Arthur Akuien Chol’s journey from his beginnings as a cattle boy in South Sudan, through his struggle to gain […]
Celebrating our last night in Oxford. Every conversation, tutorial, writing workshop and meeting with scholars across biography, life writing, English Literature, medical humanities and the history of medicine sparked ideas that resulted in breakthroughs in my writing. While in Oxford, I decided to launch ‘Writing the Scientist’s Life’, a weekly podcast of interviews with science […]
Today I finally submitted an essay to the Australian Journal of Biography and History on narrative choices in biography I’ve been working on since January. The breakthrough came on Tuesday when my tutorial group of fellow visiting scholars at Oxford University’s Centre for Life Writing analysed it and gave me feedback, which was confronting but […]
Today at Oxford University’s Centre for Life Writing where I’m a visiting scholar, I enjoyed the privilege of taking part in a workshop with Dame Professor Hermione Lee on the boundaries between fact and fiction in biography. Hermione established Oxford’s Centre for Life Writing in 2016 and is the acclaimed biographer of Virginia Woolf and […]
Greetings from The Centre for Life Writing at Oxford University’s Wolfson College where I will spend the next three weeks at tutorials, writing feedback groups, lectures, seminars and daily writing workshops, one presented by Dame Hermione Lee, Tom Stoppard and Virginia Woolf’s biographer and founder of the Centre for Life Writing. It feels like my […]
Greetings from Montreal where we are retracing the footsteps of my biographical subject, Dr Michael J. Cousins’ at McGill’s medical school and the austere, Gothic, nineteenth century Royal Victoria Hospital where he embarked on his pain medicine career in 1969. Today, Daniel Chartrand, Vice-Chairman of Anaesthesia at McGill University, took us on a tour of […]
Greetings from McGill University’s medical school in Montreal where I’m retracing the footsteps of my biographical subject, Dr Michael J. Cousins as he embarked on his pain medicine career in 1969. His favourite place in McGill’s medical school was the Osler Library of the History of Medicine. Today I soaked up its ambience and felt […]
