The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast features a series of conversations with past and present Windham-Campbell Prize winners about their favorite books and plays. Hosted by Michael Kelleher.
For the final episode of the 2025 Winter Season, Mike talks with Helen Green, winner of a 2016 Windham-Campbell Prize for Non-fiction, about Henry Green’s Party Going. They celebrate the joys of the NYRB Classics sale, the mysteries of Australian Rules football, and the joys of this ensemble novel.
For a full episode transcript, click here.
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Reading list:
Party Going by Henry Green • Loving by Henry Green • Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
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From the episode:
Helen Garner: When I watched a lot of football last year for this football book I’ve just written… In Australian Rules football, there’s a lot of handball and you’ve gotta punch the ball to the other person. So you see a player running at top speed, absolutely racing down the field, and suddenly he’ll just handball blindly to his left or his right. And one of his mates is there, grabs the ball and he’s got it, and away he goes.
Well, I could not understand until I asked, how does he know there’s someone there?
My granddaughter who used to play says, “oh, there’s a lot of shouting that goes on out there, Hel.” And I thought he does that hand-pass between characters—it’s seamless and he just trusts that it’s gonna work. The other character’s there ready to take on the narrative. You don’t even see the movement of the hand that punches the ball. It’s just the most exquisite handling.
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Helen Garner writes novels, stories, screenplays, and works of non-fiction. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, and in 2016 she won the prestigious Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for Non-fiction. In 2019 she was honoured with the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. Her books include Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach, Cosmo Cosmolino, The Spare Room, The First Stone, This House of Grief, Everywhere I Look, and her diaries Yellow Notebook, One Day I’ll Remember This, and How to End a Story. Her latest book is The Season.
The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
