Category Reviews
Lovely review of Bloodhound in Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Canberra Times
Bloodhound review: Ramona Koval goes in search of her father Melinda Harvey Published: May 22, 2015 – 11:40AM Bloodhound: Searching for my Father RAMONA KOVAL TEXT, $32.99 Bloodhound is an investigation into the interdependency of the personal life narratives we construct for ourselves, and the rights but also responsibilities these narratives entail. It begins with […]
Wonderful review of Bloodhound in The Australian
In Bloodhound, Ramona Koval tracks down family secrets by: Felcity Plunkett ,The Australian ,April 25, 2015 12:00AM Ramona Koval’s embarks on a quest to discover the truth of her parentage. Source: News Corp Australia Ramona Koval describes herself as a ‘‘professional asker of questions’’. A much-loved presenter of ABC Radio National’s erstwhile programs Books and […]
The New Yorker reviews my book Speaking Volumes.
A great start to 2014! Here’s The New Yorker’s review of literary interview books including my “Speaking Volumes: conversations with remarkable writers”, published by Scribe.
The Monthly Book, September: Lloyd Jones – A History of Silence
At 20 Stone Street, little was known about anything except spot welding, knitting, rugby and the right time to plant cabbages and put in the tomatoes. The residue of family lore is light. Some of it sticks. But it is like learning an isolated fact, such as Moscow being the capital of Russia. One grandfather […]
Interview with philosopher Rai Gaita on J.M.Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus
Here’s the video of this interview – the transcript appears below: RAMONA KOVAL: Well, it’s wonderful to be welcoming Rai Gaita to the Monthly Book to speak about our first choice for 2013, and that’s JM Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus. Now, normally, Rai, We’d be speaking to the author, but, as you know, JM Coetzee […]
The Monthly Book for June: Night Games by Anna Krien
Watch my conversation with writer Anna Krien about her new book Night Games. It’s our Monthly Book for June, a razor-sharp analysis of how sport reflects our culture. The book centres on an incident that occurred in the wake of the 2010 AFL Grand Final: after Collingwood’s post-match celebrations, a young woman accuses a young […]
A deeply thoughtful review of Best Oz Essays 2012 by writer David Sornig
What a pleasure it is to read a review like this one, where the reviewer seems to have been inside your head as you made your decisions about which essays to choose of all that were available, and how to place them so that they would sing to one another, sometimes sweetly, sometimes in discordant […]
Elizabeth Jolley – all too human
Here’s my Sydney Morning Herald review (5/5/12) of Susan Swingler’s memoire, The House of Fiction – Leonard, Susan and Elizabeth Jolley, Fremantle Press Elizabeth Jolley was a tricky customer. In our radio interviews she posed as an eccentric, bird-like elderly lady, with singular dress-sense (she was fond of cheesecloth, cardigans and sandals) and she had […]
