Bernadette Brennan is a literary critic, academic and researcher in contemporary Australian writing. She is the author of a number of publications and her literary criticism is published widely. In 2017 she published her award-winning literary biography A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work (Text). Her most recent book is Leaping Into Waterfalls: The Enigmatic Gillian Mears (A&U, 2021) which has been shortlisted for the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards 2022. In November 2018 she was the recipient of the inaugural Fellowship for Non-Fiction awarded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. Bernadette is also a judge for the prestigious Miles Franklin Award.
The conversation covers:
- Brennan’s PhD and studies of absence and silences in Australian literature
- Brenda Niall’s My Accidental Career
- Reading for the Miles Franklin Award and reading for pleasure (especially writers in translation)
- Reading and note taking for reviews and analysis
- Foal’s Bread by Gillian Mears
- The contradictions within Mears and her writing, explored in Leaping into Waterfalls
- Developing a friendship with Helen Garner (listen to our interview with Garner in 2021)
- The practicalities of working with an archive
- Brennan’s research process and routines
- Hazel Rowley – ‘there’s no such thing as a boring life’
- Interviews as both ‘a privilege and so much fun’
- Brennan’s relationships with her subjects and the difference between them
- Garner’s insistence that Brennan find someone to say ‘something bad about her’
- Establishing boundaries when reading through difficult material for research
- Future archives and how correspondence might be recorded (or not!)
- The logistics of pitching and selling non fiction works
- On women’s wanting: Television adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, Drusilla Modjeska’s Stravinsky’s lunch
- Panel on criticism with Declan Fry and Catriona Menzies Pike
- Why Brennan wants to see literary prize long lists celebrated more
Advice:
‘The delete button is often your best friend.’
‘Trust your reader. Less is more.
Debut recommendation: Mandy Beaumont’s The Furies (also recommended by Tony Birch in his conversation with us)
Find Bernadette Brennan and her work on her website and on twitter.
The First Time podcast 