Sarah Sentilles — Photo: Jon Tjhia

Sarah Sentilles digs into our world’s most brutal and profound instincts with critic and writer Maria Tumarkin.

Across four books, and the striking Drone Alerts project, Sentilles has plumbed questions of spirituality and absolution, life and death. In Draw Your Weapons, Sentilles turns her eye to art and war; metaphor and survival. How do we create, accept, understand and recover from violence? How do we live with it?

In a deft and genre-crossing exposition, Draw Your Weapons deploys ideas from memoir, criticism, journalism, literature, visual culture and theology. It centres on two people – one a former prison guard at Abu Ghraib, the other a conscientious objector to World War II – and the work of understanding suffering, and rediscovering dignity, through art. In breathless reviews, critics have likened it to Maggie Nelson or Susan Sontag, and labelled it transformative, fierce and brilliant. This conversation may just be, too.

Maria Tumarkin and Sarah Sentilles in conversation — Photo: Jon Tjhia

Our Magic Hour (design by Imogen Stubbs, bottom centre) and Resurrection Bay (design by Sandy Cull, top centre)

As much as we're doing ebooks, it's still very much about the object.

Imogen Stubbs

For this episode we brought two of Australia's best book designers together for a podcast-only conversation about their careers, their craft and how it all comes together.

Sandy Cull is a freelance book designer and a member of the Australian Book Design Hall of Fame, while Imogen Stubbs is an emerging designer and art director at Text Publishing. Coming at this conversation from different angles, they compare notes on the book design industry, the creative process and how they've worked with authors and publishers to create the perfect cover.