Bernadette Brennan

speaker

419 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard May 2018 last heard 29 May

Bernadette Brennan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Bookshelf · On Michael Ondaatje's Warlight, Jenny Ackland's Little Gods, Charmaine Craig's Miss Burma and David Peace's Patient X. · 11 May 2018 podcast

I was a bit sceptical to begin with about this novel.

It had lots of fantastic reviews from, you know, the big American journals saying how wonderful it was.

And I felt to an extent that there are moments in it where it is overwritten.

You have to accept I'm coming off the back of Helen Garner.

I've become a slasher.

So it's an interesting question that she chose to use a novel as a novel form.

I think it's a really fantastic form to do a big story of a political story, which we've seen in Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and Kim Scott's Taboo.

I think they do that brilliantly and use the novel form in that way.

This one, it's based on Charmaine Craig's family.

So that gives it an authenticity.

Which is quite extraordinary.

And that it was actually her mother, Louisa, who is the young girl in the story who is crowned Miss Burma.

Can you give us a sense of the time period we're talking about?

Because it is pretty complicated.

It is pretty complicated.

The novel moves from, I think, basically 1920s up until the late 1960s, I think it is.

It's a big novel.

I can turn the pages and see this here.

Yeah, till 65 it goes through, 1926 to 1965.

These days we know quite a bit, well, we think we know quite a bit about what are now called the Rohingya people in Myanmar.

Showing 321–340 of 419 · page 17 of 21