It's a Long Story

Not a lot of women get to practice law in Afghanistan, but attorney Kimberly Motley is one of the very few. Raised in a poor, majority black neighbourhood in Milwaukee in America’s midwest, Kimberly has made a career defending particularly difficult cases, and in learning how to navigate the Afghani legal system, she has also developed a unique understanding of inter-cultural approaches to justice. She’s talking to Benjamin Law at ...

Feminists get a bad rap for being angry. But what would it be like if women were allowed to embrace their anger? American writer Soraya Chemaly has been calling for this shift for years. A prolific voice on the role of gender in culture and politics,  she has had a long career in media and technology. And, she has encountered a lot to be angry about. Her latest book, Rage Becomes Her is a celebration of female anger. It tackles the...

Sohaila Abdulali did not want to write a book about her experience of being raped. It was a long time ago and she’d very much moved on with her life. But, after some articles she’d written about it went viral, she did write a book. 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape' is an incredible, genre-defying discussion of the troubling ways that rape and sexual violence are experienced and discussed. With no self-pity but much insig...

Sarah Smarsh is the daughter of a teenaged mother, who was the daughter of a teenaged mother, who was the daughter of a teenaged mother. Born into a dirt-poor family in rural Kansas, Smarsh realised young that if she could get educated and not pregnant, she would be able to break the pattern of the women in her family. Her memoir, Heartland, is a wonderful tribute to those women, as well as a proud  insider’s look into a culture th...

Adam Liaw understands how Australian families eat. Emigrating to South Australia from Malaysia in the 1980s his childhood was a delicious mix of international cuisines. Adam’s precocious smarts fast-tracked his academic career, and landed him at law school well ahead of schedule. Moving to Japan in his twenties to work at Disney Asia, he was settling into Japanese culture. But everything changed when he applied on a whim for the se...

When Liz Jackson woke up one morning back in 2012 unable to feel her legs, her life radically changed direction. Diagnosed with a neuromuscular disease, Liz left her successful career in television to become a designer and activist, devoted to improving design for disabled people across the world. Her blog, The Girl with the Purple Cane, and her organisation The Disabled List, brings the unique insights and skills of disabled peopl...

It’s hard to remember what we used to cook before Yotam Ottolenghi burst into our culinary consciousness. His brand of colourful, vegetable-based food has transformed kitchens and tables the world over. Born in Jerusalem, Yotam was set to pursue an academic career after completing a master’s degree in comparative literature. However at age 30 he decided to move to London to become a chef, and his future was rewritten. His London re...

Walking through Kew Gardens in London with his family was formative for polymath, writer and tree-lover Jonathan Drori. With a career bridging engineering and broadcasting, he was part of the trailblazing team which created the very first iteration of BBC online, surfed the crest of the dotcom boom, and created a whole lot of very good BBC television programs. Yet the pull of the natural world held strong, and his book, Around the ...

What Lisa-Ann Gershwin does not know about jellyfish probably doesn’t count, and no one gets quite as excited about gelatinous medusas as she does. Raised in California by hippie parents, her undiagnosed Asperger’s syndrome marked her an outsider during childhood. It wasn’t until she fell in love with marine biology that she started to find her way. Now an internationally recognised scientist, researcher and author, she has persona...

Kevin McCloud had a childhood where everything was built from scratch, and his home was more like a workshop. So it’s no surprise that the built world eventually became the focus of his life and work. Yet in his earlier years Kevin wore many different hats, from working in an Italian vineyard, studying music, designing sets for the Cambridge theatre troupe the Footlights, owning a lighting design shop and designing the famous ceili...

When the war in Syria was tearing apart their home city of Homs, architect Marwa Al-Sabouni and her husband made the decision to stay there with their two young children, rather than to become refugees. In her memoir, The Battle for Home, she writes about the experience of continuing daily life in a battle zone, and of the importance of architecture in determining the fates of cities. Marwa’s work now is concerned with the impact o...

What do you do when you decide at the age of seven that the world is an unfair place and you need to try and change it? Raj Patel’s career has been dedicated to ending inequality. From studying philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, London School of Economics and Cornell, to learning about the inner workings of the World Trade Organisation and the World Bank as an intern, Raj was always going to be an activist. His writing a...