Richard Fidler

5 days ago | abc.net.au | Nicola Harrison |Alice Moldovan |Richard Fidler

Nathan Dunne was swimming in Hampstead Heath in London in the middle of winter in 2008 when a psychological catastrophe struck him. Nathan felt his sense of self split in two, and an unbearable pain overtook him. He was driven to attempt suicide, and endured years of misdiagnoses from doctors and medications that didn't work. Nathan didn't have the words to describe the confusion, pain and splitting of self he was experiencing. For years, water was the symbol of his undoing.

1 week ago | abc.net.au | Carmel Rooney |Richard Fidler

Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason is a former English academic and the mother of seven extraordinary children. All of them are gifted classical musicians. Her eldest daughter, Isata wrote and performed her first piano concerto at the age of eleven. Her son Sheku mastered the cello and performed at the royal wedding of Harry and Megan Markle. Every day the seven Kanneh-Masons, who range from early teens to the mid-twenties, fill the family home with glorious, sometimes chaotic, music.

1 week ago | abc.net.au | Nicola Harrison |Meggie Morris |Richard Fidler

Hilde Hinton's upbringing was marked by the shocking death of her mother when Hilde was just 12 years old. Despite the great grief, there was also a sense of relief for Hilde. She shielded her younger siblings, Samuel and Connie Johnson, from the truth of how and why their mother died. But when Connie also died, decades later of cancer, Hilde was propelled into writing her first novel, in between shifts as a prison officer.

2 weeks ago | abc.net.au | Carmel Rooney |Nicola Harrison |Richard Fidler

Sean Sweeney grew up as a child of deaf adults and was the first hearing baby to be born to his mother's family in four generations. Sean first signed the word for 'bottle' to his mum at 10 months. He grew up in a tight-knit deaf community with a lot of pride in their uniquely Australian version of sign language, named Auslan in the 1980s. In his twenties, Sean rebelled against the deaf world, and began to look for a new life in the hearing one. But after eighteen years, he returned.

3 weeks ago | abc.net.au | Nicola Harrison |Meggie Morris |Richard Fidler

When Hannah Kent arrived in Iceland as an exchange student in 2003, her arrival was a difficult one. On her first night in the country, she found herself stranded late at night at Keflavik Airport and desperately homesick. But within weeks, Iceland had begun to change young Hannah. She became entranced with the haunting story of accused murderer and domestic servant Agnes Magnusdottir, who became the last woman executed in Iceland.