Lost Cause: Jeff Sparrow with Cate Kennedy at the Bendigo Writers Festival

For Jeff Sparrow, writing about the magnificent singer Paul Robeson meant telling a “ghost story”, where what happened to this brave, perplexed man haunts the present with its tragic consequences. Obstinate he may have been, but it was Robeson’s strengths, rather than his weaknesses, that have led to him virtually disappearing from history. Cate Kennedy talks to Jeff about why he chose to write about this American singer and what he learnt about politics and commitment along the way.

Jeff Sparrow
Jeff Sparrow is a writer, editor, and broadcaster, and an honorary fellow at Victoria University. He writes a fortnightly column for The Guardian and contributes regularly to many other publications, as well as being a member of the 3RRR Breakfasters radio team. Jeff is the immediate past editor of the literary and cultural journal Overland, and the author of several books, including Communism: a love story, Killing: misadventures in violence, and Trigger Warnings.

Cate Kennedy
Cate Kennedy is the author of the highly acclaimed novel The World Beneath, which won the People’s Choice Award in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in 2010. She is an award-winning short-story writer whose work has been published widely. Her first collection, Dark Roots, was shortlisted for the Steele Rudd Award in the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. She is also the author of a travel memoir, Sing, and Don’t Cry, her short story collection, Like a House on Fire, and the poetry collections Joyflight, Signs of Other Fires and The Taste of River Water, which won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2011. She lives on a secluded bend of the Broken River in north-east Victoria.