Author, creative director and culture critic, Jonathan Seidler, will discuss his extraordinary and powerful memoir It's a Shame About Ray. A blackly funny and frequently devastating story, this memoir traverses family, death, hope, love, survival, compassion and the deep relationship we can develop with music when nothing else is enough. It's a Shame About Ray asks how we shape new identities from old tragedies – and whether the answers might be hiding in the bestselling record of 2001. Jonathan is joined by Michaela Kalowski.
Jonathan Seidler (Australian)

Jonathan Seidler is an author, creative director and culture critic. His work has been published frequently in The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, Monocle and GQ. Jonathan co-founded the long-running music blog One A Day, launched two nationally syndicated fiction series for Broadsheet and recently commissioned, edited and published an Unyoked anthology of nature writing. Jonathan wrote and performed the score for Snare, shortlisted for SXSW and Tribeca 2019 and more recently was music supervisor on the SBS series Latecomers.
Michaela Kalowski (Australian)

Michaela Kalowski is an interviewer, moderator and curator for writers and ideas festivals. Highlight interviews include Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, Michelle de Kretser, Stan Grant and Etgar Keret. She's the curator of ABC RN's on-air writers festival, Big Weekend of Books, now in its 4th year. She hosts a monthly books conversation event for Petersham Bowling Club in Sydney. Michaela has conducted radio interviews for ABC RN's The Music Show, Big Ideas and The Bookshelf, ABC Classic and has presented programs across ABC radio.