The Working Lives of Others

Elise Hawthorne                      

The work one does often help us to define who we are as a person and can show the wider world where our talents lie.

Award-winning novelist and essayist Ceridwen Dovey turns her ever curious gaze towards the world of work in her recently published collection of profiles, Inner Worlds Outer Spaces: The Working Lives of Others. Ceridwen shines a light on an inspiring group of people, almost all of them Australians, who are forging their distinctive paths in their chosen vocations. By tracing the intimate trajectories of their lives and diverse careers, she invites readers to come with her on an exploration of fields of knowledge and expertise that are often inaccessible to outsiders.

Those profiled include the novelist Liane Moriarty, the Olympic swimming legend Ian Thorpe, and the world’s top solar cell scientists and shark-bite policy experts, as well as many people in more unorthodox careers, such as space archaeologists, a moon dust maven, a master perfumer, women’s rugby champions, a scholar of medieval suicide, and recent Antarctic Arts Fellows, among many others.

In each section of the book – Earthly Spaces, Outer Spaces, Inner Spaces, and Shifting Spaces – we encounter Australians who spend their daily working lives figuring out solutions to the pressing environmental problems of our planet and its surrounds in outer space, who are innovating in how they create or share knowledge, and who are rethinking and challenging the status quo in Australian history, politics or culture.

This collection of profiles showcases Ceridwen’s acuity, her sensitive and compassionate insights. It is a celebration of those who have found a way to transform their passions into their life’s work, often against the odds.

Inner Worlds Outer Spaces: The Working Lives of Others is published by Penguin Random House Australia.

Ceridwen Dovey is an award-winning Australian fiction writer and essayist. She is the author of several works of fiction (Blood Kin, Only the Animals, In the Garden of the Fugitives, and a forthcoming Audible Originals novel, Life After Truth) and the memoir-biography On J.M. Coetzee: Writers on Writers. She writes for many publications, including the New Yorker’s website, WIRED, and The Monthly. Her essays and profiles have been selected for The Best Australian Science Writing 2019, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2018, and The Best Australian Essays 2015.