Ten years after creating an expanding audio archive of Australian authors reading their work before discussing it in an interview, Karena Wynn-Moylan has been nominated for a national award.
Ms Wynn-Moylan’s volunteer project, The Narratives Library, is nominated in this year’s Australian Audio Awards alongside mostly commercial radio entries, in the Special Interest Program category, with winners to be announced at a gala event in Sydney on 28 May.
The volunteer Bay FM Community Radio presenter/producer of the weekly Arts Canvassmorning program says she was inspired to start building the website in 2016, having spent years interviewing authors on air.
Arts Canvass focuses on the vast and diverse Northern Rivers arts industries and has been broadcasting for nearly 30 years.
Radio was traditionally ‘really ephemeral’, Ms Wynn-Moylan says, and she wanted a more permanent place where people could go to hear her collection of interviews with authors, mostly recorded on-site at six annual writers’ festivals across the country.
The distinction of having more than 600 authors, rather than actors, read their work aloud means The Narratives Library has become an irreplaceable archive of Australian literature history.
A dedicated community radio program by the same name has become a regular fixture in community broadcasting via the second hour of Arts Canvass each Thursday and other stations around Australia to air content from the Community Radio Network.
Writers ‘are never stuck for words’
Unlike most media devoted to books, the online resource is not a review site, with its creator declaring her opinion unimportant.
The diversity in topics and voices heard echoes an evolving Australian society, with Ms Wynn-Moylan describing it as fascinating.
Writers have usually spent years working on a book, she says, and are never stuck for words, making them ‘dream interviewees’.
‘It’s always interesting when it’s a subject I have no idea about,’ she says, adding that she deliberately avoids reading every book before hitting record.
‘I always ask them to choose the passage,’ she says, ‘that will lead to the rest of the book’.
Voices switch ‘from a Yorkshire accent to an Australian accent, to a New York accent to a Persian accent,’ and it turns out, ‘not all authors are fantastic readers’.
‘That’s charming in itself,’ the acclaimed radio presenter says, ‘it’s a more personal connection’.
The project is ‘all about getting the ideas out there,’ she says, adding that books are one of the last bastions of ‘clean information,’ because they are still usually fact-checked.
But all types of books, including fiction, are featured in The Narratives Library, where popular award-winning authors may be heard alongside lesser well-known poets and academics.
Melissa Lucashenko and Trent Dalton are just two headline names on the record in The Narratives Library.
Listen to the interview with Karena Wynn-Moylan via Bay FM’s Community Newsroom here.
*Mia Armitage is a member of Bay FM’s volunteer management committee and reports for Community Newsrom
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