Skin in the Game: The pleasure and pain of telling true stories

$27.99

Format: ISBN 9780995409842 Trade Paperback 224ppp Rights: World Release / Publication Date: 01 /03 /2018
Category:

Description

Stella Prize long-listed author Sonya Voumard’s Skin in the Game is original, incisive and hugely entertaining.

The daughter of a European refugee mother and a journalist father, Voumard recounts with aplomb her passionate but questioning relationship with journalism and the nature of the interview. The daughter of a European refugee mother and a journalist father, Voumard recounts with aplomb her passionate but questioning relationship with journalism and the nature of the interview. There’s a disastrous 1980 university encounter with Helen Garner which forms the seed for her fascination with the dynamics of the interview and culminates in her connecting again with Garner more than three decades later to work out what went so wrong. There are the insights of a career played out against the changing nature of journalism including the author’s time as a Canberra correspondent. And there are revealing and tender portraits of Kings Cross, of growing up in suburban Melbourne, her father’s love of journalism, and a family journey to the Bonegilla Migrant Reception Centre where her mother’s Australian life began.

Throughout it all Voumard is a sharpshooter, never afraid to hold a mirror up to her own life and practices as a journalist, to dig deep into the ethics of journalism and the use of power, and to sensitively explore the intertwined nature of life and work and personal relationships. The writing is at turns sharp, funny, direct, strong and affectionate.

‘I’ve immense admiration for how Sonya Voumard so deftly wields a writer’s scalpel, both on her subjects and herself. Together, these dispatches provide a fascinating insider’s account of Australian journalism and a forensic look into the myriad pitfalls involved in telling people’s stories.’ Benjamin Law, author of The Family Law and Gaysia

 

Sonya Voumard is a Sydney-based journalist and  author whose work has been widely published in major Australian newspapers, magazines and literary journals. She has lectured part-time in creative non-fiction and journalism at UTS. Her first novel, Political Animals (2008) was inspired by her time as a political correspondent for the Age in Canberra. Her critically acclaimed book The Media and the Massacre: Port Arthur 1996-2016 (2016 ) was longlisted for the prestigious Stella Prize in 2017.