The Wheeler Centre

What happens when the promise of reinvention collides with the ruthless machinery of reality television?Drawing on his own experience as a two-time Survivor contestant, Stephen Fishbach’s sharply observed novel Escape! follows a washed-up reality television star and a disgraced producer, each chasing a second chance on a new survival show where every contestant has been cast as a type, every storyline has been carefully engineered and the stakes soon become far greater than anyone imagined.Fishbach joins host Veronica Sullivan for a conversation about the blurred boundaries between performance and authenticity and what our appetite for spectacle reveals about contemporary culture. Originally presented on Wednesday 14 October 2026 by The Wheeler Centre.The official bookseller was Readings.Featured music is 'Traveling Again' by Sarah, the Illstrumentalist.Support the Wheeler Centre: https://www.wheelercentre.com/support-us/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hear from one of the country’s most acclaimed authors, Kate Grenville, on her dazzling new work of non-fiction – a colonial-era cold case that’s part locked-room mystery, part captivating exploration of a writer's imagination navigating the blurred boundaries between fact and possibility. The Country Schoolmaster: A Mystery in 88 Letters begins with the discovery of an unassuming bundle of letters in an archive. On closer inspection, they reveal a complex and curious tale of victims, villains and small-town secrets. Was schoolmaster Joseph Connor savagely beating the students in his care? Or was he the victim of a small-town vendetta? And what went so terribly wrong between him and his daughter? Fearlessly grappling with complicated histories and the strange textures of the past, Grenville once again reveals how great stories can emerge from unassuming archival fragments. Join her in conversation with Santilla Chingaipe as she lifts the lid on this fascinating true story.  Originally presented on Thursday 1 October 2026 by The Wheeler Centre. Featured music is 'Traveling Again' by Sarah, the Illstrumentalist. The official bookseller was Ramona Books.  Support the Wheeler Centre: https://www.wheelercentre.com/support-us/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

India’s great chronicler of memory, family, identity and belonging sits down with host Mridula Nath Chakraborty to discuss her luminous, genre-defying books and extraordinary literary career.  Originally presented on Wednesday 12 August 2026 by The Wheeler Centre. ‘Anything worth doing transcends borders,’ writes Geetanjali Shree in her 2022 International Booker Prize-winning novel, Tomb of Sand. This sentiment also encapsulates her career to date. An author writing in Hindi, with her gaze firmly fixed on the lives and concerns of Indian characters, Shree tells the kind of polyphonic, big-hearted stories that chime with universal truth. From Our City That Year, an evocative tale of love, loss and the indelible marks left by time, to the poetic and formally inventive short stories in the collection Once Elephants Lived Here, to the lauded Tomb of Sand, Shree’s work offers readers insight into the rich plurality of the world.Join her for a conversation about the ascendency of South Asian literature, the life-changing impact of winning the International Booker Prize and how storytelling connects us across backgrounds and borders.Support the Wheeler Centre: https://www.wheelercentre.com/support-us/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tech critic Cory Doctorow on the broken promise of the utopian internet, the systems that sustain it and what it might take to reclaim a more open digital future. With host Professor Lisa M. Given, Director, Centre for Human-AI Information Environments at RMIT University. Originally presented on Tuesday 25 August 2026 by The Wheeler Centre in partnership with Now or Never and RMIT University.You’re not imagining it: the experience of being online is getting worse. Services degrade, platforms shift and what once felt open and useful becomes harder to recognise. What was once good is now… shit. This is not a glitch. In fact, it’s by design. ‘Enshittification’, a term coined by tech critic Cory Doctorow, names what is already happening.In this talk, Doctorow outlines how major platforms like Facebook, Amazon and X are structured to follow this trajectory. First, users are drawn in with convenience and connection. Then, advertisers are invited into the system. Finally, the experience itself is stripped back in the pursuit of profit.Featured music is 'Traveling Again' by Sarah, the Illstrumentalist.The official bookseller was Brunswick Bound.Support the Wheeler Centre: https://www.wheelercentre.com/support-us/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What does it take to keep showing up to the blank page? Award-winning author Alice Pung offers reasons for optimism in this year’s E. W. Cole Lecture. Originally presented on Thursday 6 August 2026 by The Wheeler Centre, supported by the E. W. Cole Foundation.  Two decades ago, Alice Pung published Unpolished Gem, a funny, loving and irreverent portrait of a migrant family’s everyday struggles and bittersweet triumphs. In celebration of the 20th anniversary of her beloved debut, Pung presents this year’s E. W. Cole Lecture on a subject near to her heart: the fundamentals of writing and the circumstances under which writers practice their craft. Drawing on knowledge earned from writing 15 books across contemporary fiction, YA, children’s literature and non-fiction, she examines the work that goes into the act of creation and what it takes to carry on writing, day after day.   Pung speaks on the quiet power of turning up through crises, changing political situations and changing tastes, and what makes it all worthwhile: how writing – and reading – can help us make sense of our lives, and the world at large, now more than ever.The official bookseller was Amplify Bookstore.Featured music is Br1ghter (Instrumental Version) by Tape Machines.Support the Wheeler Centre: https://www.wheelercentre.com/support-us/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.