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Final Draft - Great Conversations

Final Draft - Great Conversations

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About this listen

 Great conversations with authors from Australia and around the world. Art Literary History & Criticism
Episodes
  • George Kemp’s Soft Serve

    George Kemp’s Soft Serve
    Feb 17 2026
    The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love. These are the stories that make us who we are. George Kemp is an award winning writer of fiction, plays and television. In 2024, George was accepted into The Faber Academy, during which he wrote his first novel SOFT SERVE. In a small town McDonald’s four reluctant individuals gather to remember Taz. Pat is still mourning the son she lost too young. Fern, Jacob and Ethan miss their friend and struggle with how their lives have become stuck since his death. This is no simple anniversary though. As fires circle the town, bearing down on the Maccas, the four must confront how they are trapped not just by natural disaster but by their choices since Taz died. Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople⁠ Want more great conversations with Australian authors? ⁠Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week⁠.
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    38 mins
  • Rhett Davis’s Arborescence

    Rhett Davis’s Arborescence
    Feb 13 2026
    The Final Draft podcast is all about books, writing and literary culture. We're dedicated to exploring Australian writing, looking into the issues that drive our storytelling to discover more from the books you love. These are the stories that make us who we are. Rhett Davis is the author of Hovering. Today we’ve got his new novel Arborescence Arborescence is the state of having the root and branch like structures of a tree. Importantly it’s a noun, but Rhett Davis asks us to imagine if it were a verb… Caelyn is at a loss. She’s bouncing between jobs that she quickly loses, like when she gets fired from a nursery for taking home the dying plants (they considered it stealing!). She hates that we’re destroying the world but feels powerless to stop it. When she hears about a group trying to become trees, she and her partner Bren go to investigate. What she finds are people standing still in a field, with a support network of others caring for them as they attempt to Arboresce. It’s a mad dream, but what if it could be true? Final Draft is produced and presented by Andrew Pople Want more great conversations with Australian authors? Discover this and many more conversations on Final Draft every week.
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    35 mins
  • Book Club - Kay Kerr’s Might Cry Later

    Book Club - Kay Kerr’s Might Cry Later
    Feb 11 2026
    Summer time in the Final Draft household brings lots of new release and pre-release titles and the corresponding challenge of knowing where to start. When the titles started rolling in though it was very easy to pick up Kay Kerr’s new novel, her first aimed at adult readers because I’ve enjoyed her Young Adult writing, as well as her strong autistic characters and her approach to neurodiversity. Kay is an author and journalist based on the Sunshine Coast, Australia. She’s the author of Please Don’t Hug Me, Social Queue, and Love & Autism. Kay’s latest novel, Might Cry Later, is our book club title for today. Nora is home for Xmas, Actually she’s been home a little longer than that and will probably be staying a bit after. At twenty-one and living in Melbourne Nora found her life imploding. What came next, well Nora’s not quite ready to face yet, but she came home with a brand new Autism diagnosis that no one in her family wants to talk about. Holidays are hard enough, but as Nora watches all the people in her life gather round she questions whether her neurodiverse brain can regulate through all this stimulation. Might Cry Later is the story of Nora and her journey through late-diagnosis of Autism. For context, and acknowledging differences in reporting, average ages for diagnosis are typically reported within childhood and females are generally diagnosed later than males. Nora’s story of declining mental health before a diagnosis represents so many women’s experience of having their neurodiversity misunderstood or misdiagnosed on the pathway to diagnosis. That’s the stats but what Kay Kerr gives us is the heartfelt and raw story of what that means in the real world and confronts us with the challenge that getting a diagnosis is just the beginning. When we meet Nora at her parent’s home in the Gold Coast Hinterland it seems like she’s in paradise. Nora acknowledges how the peace and natural environment are good for her and helps her regulate a sensory system she’s learning reacts differently to other people’s. Nora’s also having to deal with how her family, and particularly her family at Xmas care little for sensory regulation if it does not fit in with a rigorous regime of decorating and social engagements. The story weaves between Nora’s Xmas struggles and her memories of her younger, undiagnosed self and all the struggles that now make so much sense to her. These memories force her to face the ways she wasn’t supported as she needed, but also how her behaviours also hurt those closest to her, particularly her best friend Fran. Might Cry Later flirts with a range of classic text structures including rom-com, bildungsroman and quest, whilst ultimately carving its own path through an inevitably messy world. Nora is both endearing and unlikable to the reader, as she is to herself and it’s a strength of the storytelling that we go on this journey of uncertainty with such confidence. I found myself rooting for Nora in her everyday work to figure out her life. Her story is a wonderful look into the autistic experience, and part of a growing body of writing exploring the neurodiverse world.
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    4 mins
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