Ramona Koval presents ‘The Book Show’ on ABC Radio National, heard weekdays across Australia, and podcast globally. She makes documentary features for radio, and has written newspaper features and columns on issues of the day. Transcripts of her interviews have been published in international newspapers, magazines, and in digital form. She has been invited to interview writers at literary festivals in Edinburgh, Cheltenham, Montreal, Berlin, and all over Australia.

She is the author of a novel, Samovar, and four books of non-fiction, including a Jewish cookbook. She has worked as an academic at RMIT University and the University of Melbourne, and before that as a microbiologist and geneticist.

Ramona Koval has been praised as a master of the interview genre, renowned for engaging writers in conversations that are incisive, provocative, and downright funny.

In this new collection, Speaking Volumes: conversations with remarkable writers, she shares the most fascinating interviews from her 2005 book Tasting Life Twice, along with brand new interviews with some of the most important writers of our times.

Through Koval, we are privy to the extraordinary minds of Joseph Heller, Joyce Carol Oates, Mario Vargas Llosa, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, David Malouf, P. D. James, John Mortimer, Ian McEwan, Amos Oz, Gore Vidal, Harold Pinter, John le Carré, Barry Lopez, Malcolm Bradbury, William Gass, Judith Wright, Les Murray, Fay Weldon, A. S. Byatt, Margaret Drabble, Martin Amis, Toni Morrison, André Brink, John Banville, Jeanette Winterson, Hanif Kureishi, and Anne Enright, among others.