Heather Nielsen
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
It's my favourite kind of reading.
Thank you very much for having me on the show.
Oh, that's a really good question because, yes, I never actually formally studied political science or international relations, but I came to American literature and politics as a small child through American television.
Growing up in Presbyterian Geelong, I was fascinated by American television.
It is sort of that I kind of associated with the centre of things rather than
Britain you know which my brother was attracted to you know same same upbringing but different directions but at the age of 15 I discovered the late writer Gore Vidal through his book Burr which was a novel about Thomas Jefferson's disgraced first vice president Aaron Burr and of course if people are familiar with that name now it's probably through Hamilton the Musical and
which really represents Aaron Burr as a villain.
But in Gore Vidal's novel and other works of history, he was kind of reclaimed, vindicated.
He's been represented as a traitor.
But really it was Gore Vidal who got me into an interest in that connection between literature and politics.
And so these days, as a reader, I'm drawn to books
literature and film which represents the ways in which Americans think about themselves, but also literature and film which has a bit of wit to it.
He was quite prescient in his lifetime in a sense.