24. Writing the Real: Fiction, Work and Witness with Gretchen Shirm and Andrew Pippos

Recorded live at the 2025 UTS Writers’ Festival, this episode of Fully Lit Live features novelists (and UTS writing alumni) Andrew Pippos and Gretchen Shirm in conversation with Delia Falconer.

In The Transformations, Pippos sets a love story inside a newsroom on the brink of digital collapse. What happens to intimacy when the workplace becomes all-consuming? How do you hold onto care, or truth, in an institution built on speed?

Shirm’s Out of the Woods, shaped by her time observing war-crimes trials in the Hague, turns to the ethics of witnessing. How is atrocity translated into legal language? What does it mean to listen to testimony day after day? And who carries its weight?

From newsrooms to courtrooms, this is a sharp, humane discussion about work, power and the radical patience of long-form storytelling.

Fully Lit is produced by Impact Studios at the University of Technology Sydney.

Credits

Gretchen Shirm is the author of Having Cried Wolf, Where the Light Falls, The Crying Room and her latest, Out of the Woods. Her novels have been shortlisted for the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction and the University of Queensland Fiction Award. Gretchen teaches in the UTS Writing and Publishing Program.

Dr Andrew Pippos is a writer of fiction and narrative nonfiction. His first novel, LUCKY'S (Picador), was published in 2020 and shortlisted for the 2021 Miles Franklin literary award. Transformations is published by Pan Macmillan. He teaches in the UTS Writing and Publishing Program.

Dr Delia Falconer is the author of two novels (The Service of Clouds and The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers) and two works of nonfiction (Sydney and Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss), which have been shortlisted for national and international awards across the categories of fiction, nonfiction, innovation, biography, history and research. She is the editor of three cohort-defining collections: The Best Australian Stories 2008, The Best Australian Stories 2009 and The Penguin Book of the Road. Delia's short stories and essays have been widely anthologised, including in the landmark Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature and The Penguin Century of Australian Stories. She has received grants and residencies from the Australia Council, the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship, Varuna and Bundanon, and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland. Since 2010 Delia has specialised in writing and teaching creative nonfiction, and she is a senior Lecturer in the UTS Writing and Publishing Program.

Series Producer: Regina Botros.

Executive Producers: Sarah Gilbert and James Jiang

Fully Lit is an Impact Studios production, in collaboration with the Sydney Review of Books.

Mixed by Siobhan Moylan.