In a first for Life Sentences, host Caroline Baum welcomes a panel of four Australian biographers to discuss the biographies they have read and enjoyed recently.

-Ryan Butta chooses Anthony Sharwood’s hybrid travelogue biography of Polish freedom fighter Tadeusz Kosciusko and also mentions Didion and Babitz, by Lili Anolik, which compares the lives of two gifted writers on the LA scene of the Sixties.

-Susan Wyndham chooses Vicki Hastrich’s The Last Days of Zane Grey about the flamboyantly successful American big game fishing legend who was also a bestselling author with a complicated love life.

-Bernadette Brennan chooses Drusilla Modjeska’s important new group biography of European and American modernist female artists who have been largely overlooked or eclipsed by male partners.

-Anthony Sharwood chooses Ryan Butta’s The Bravest Scout at Gallipoli, about the mysterious Harry Freame, an Australian war hero who was half Japanese and raised in the code of the samurai.

Caroline makes reference to the new biography of former Governor General Quentin Bryce, and to reading the doorstop epic new biography of Mark Twain by Ron Chernow. 

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