Growing up in New Jersey Amani Al-Khatahtbeh was a pretty normal kid. Then 9/11 happened and life changed forever. She spent her teenage years navigating growing racism and Islamophobia in America, and at the age of 17 she founded a blog called Muslim Girl. The site gave young Muslim women a platform to discuss all of the things – periods to politics. And over the years, it transformed from a part time passion project to a full time social movement, logging millions of hits every year.

This episode is hosted by Marc Fennell.

One evening in 1996 the basement of the Cornelia Street Café in New York’s Grenwich Village came alive when Eve Ensler performed The Vagina Monologues for the very first time. Since then, her play has been translated into 48 languages and presented in over 140 countries with the world’s best stage and screen actors performing it to packed houses. In the 20 years that have passed since the premiere, Eve has gone on to write many more plays and books, start global political movements that have made over 100 million dollars for grassroots groups. 

This episode of It's A Long Story is hosted by Marc Fennell.

An HBO Documentary, two best-selling memoirs, pop culture cover stories, beauty columns, speaking engagements, essays, social media - Janet Mock is doing it all. And at the same time, she's eager to expand beyond her personal experience and share the platform that she has built with others in her community who may not be as fortunate. Janet is arguably one of the most influential transwomen working in media and is using every tool available to her to tell the stories that shift and challenge preconceived notions about what is possible for transpeople. 

This episode of It's a Long Story is hosted by Marc Fennell.

A kitchen in Melbourne's Footscray provided the humble origins for Camp Cope's Kelly-Dawn Helmrich, Georgia Maq and Sarah Thompson. Since joining forces in 2015, the trio haven't wasted a second of their time in the spotlight, using their newfound influence to launch the It Takes One campaign. Aimed at stopping harassment of women at live music gigs, Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich has said of the project: “We have a platform now where people listen to us so we want to give back to other people who don’t have a stage to speak on.”

Since she was a kid, there was never any doubt in Izzi Manfredi’s mind that she wanted to make music. Meeting Jack Moffitt and Thomas Champion at university, the three formed The Preatures. With influences like The Beatles, the Divinyls and The Pretenders, the band achieved international success with the 2013 track, “Is this how you feel?”. Their latest release is Girlhood, a distinctly personal album, which draws on stories from Izzi’s own childhood and adolescence.

Nai Palm of Hiatus Kaiyote has recently been flying solo, with her debut album Needle Paw soon to be released. In spite of a turbulent childhood, she took solace in nature, in animals and in music, growing into the independent spirit and curious soul that has enchanted such artists as Erykah Badu, Animal Collective, Questlove and the late, great Prince.

Briggs is a rapper, comedian, actor, writer and fearless social critic. A proud Yorta Yorta man from regional Victoria, he took out the Australian Music Prize this year as half of the hip hop duo A.B. Original for their debut album Reclaim Australia, as well as appearing in the ABC's groundbreaking supernatural drama Cleverman and becoming a regular on satirical news programme The Weekly with Charlie Pickering.

S-Town's rich and thoughtful story telling captured the attention of audiences from around the world. Brian Reed, its host and co-creator, originally set out to find a new story for This American Life. Instead, he spent three years investigating the life and tribulations of small town Alabama resident John B. McLemore. The podcast captured audiences with the twists and turns of life in Bibb County, presenting an audio story akin to great literature.

Award-winning writer, journalist and public speaker, Thordis Elva was voted Woman of the Year in her native Iceland for her tireless campaigning for gender equality. She believes in ending the silence that still shrouds sexual violence, of which she is a survivor, and sees dialogue as a means of healing. She has long researched the effect of forgiveness in human relationships, an interest which took her across the globe and into the depths of her own heart, resulting in the book South of Forgiveness which she wrote with Tom Stranger.

Lindy West’s vibrant humour, refreshing candour and unapologetically trenchant attacks on body shamers and trolls have earned her the admiration of Lena Dunham, Ira Glass, and Caitlin Moran. What can each of us take away from the courage of someone who confronts rape jokes, the fat police, and anti-abortionists - and laughs to tell the tale?

Mei Fong is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who covered China for the Wall Street Journal for many years. Her book, "One Child", the story of China's most radical experiment details the repercussions of the one-child policy. Originally implemented to kerb population growth, the one-child policy resulted in immense suffering and hundreds of thousands of infant deaths. By the time the government announced it was ending the policy in 2015, China had a surplus of 33 million men and population numbers that were dropping drastically.

Has contemporary feminism grown so tame, cowardly and irrelevant that it barely challenges the status quo? Have feminists traded liberation for acceptance? What will it take to wake the movement up? In a fearless call for revolution, Jessa Crispin demands more of feminism - nothing less than the total dismantling of a system of oppression.

As a war correspondent, Janine di Giovanni has spent the last 30 years covering stories in the most dangerous places on earth. She first reported from Palestine in the late 1980's and has covered almost every major conflict area since - most recently working in Syria.

Her book, The Morning They Came For Us, tells a sequence of powerful and harrowing stories about the effect of the Syrian Civil War on ordinary people. Of her work Janine has said, 'I'm deluded if I think that what I do as a journalist can stop war, all I am is a witness, my role is to bring a voice to people who are voiceless.'

Microbiologist Giulia Enders is seriously into guts. So into guts in fact, that she's been the catalyst for a global movement to encourage people to understand their insides and to not be afraid of talking about them. Her book, Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body's Most Underrated Organ has sold well over one million copies in her native Germany and been published in over 30 different languages.

When Geena Davis was three years old she announced to her parents that she was going to be in movies.  In fact, the quote in her high school year book was "Future plans: go to the big city and become a star."

Fast forward some years and she's so much more. Fronting the Women's Sports Foundation and launching the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media - to name just a few accomplishments.

You will know Josh Thomas as the blonde-haired, 20-something from "Please Like Me." An Aussie comedy, which has stolen audience hearts the world over. The New Yorker describes the show as having a "tender, finicky quality, a different charisma." That could well be describing Josh Thomas himself.

Raised in Brisbane, he once described himself as fat and unknowingly gay. There is a lot more to this man Josh Thomas. 

Some words to describe the woman who sits before you; creative - you've seen her on TV and in theatre. Prolific - she's written more than 20 books. Overachieving maybe as well - she wrote many of them while raising two children, and controversial, but we might save that until a little bit later.

Christopher Eric Borrelli is a features and culture writer for the "Chicago Tribune." By his own admission, a bland title. But there's nothing bland about what he writes and how he writes it. I was a typical latchkey kid, he says. But it is still pop culture that shapes him. Today he writes about what for most of us is the mundane, the ordinary. The everyday. With a richness and curiosity that defies the genre.

20 years ago Julie Snyder applied for a job at a little known radio show called, 'This American Life'. They'd only been on the air for a year and she said of her application, "I was incredibly unqualified."

It was there she developed a passion for audio storytelling, and where she met Sarah Koenig. 15 years later the two would start working on a new podcast project in Sarah's basement. The project launched in 2014, it's called 'Serial'. 

Through a unique combination of audio storytelling, music and soundscapes Jad Abumrad has been credited with creating a new aesthetic for broadcast journalism. Colleague, Ira Glass speaks of his podcast 'Radiolab' confessing "I marvel at Radiolab when I hear it. I feel jealous. I'm a hack in comparison. Everyone else is too." 

Son of a doctor father and scientist mother and raised in Nashville, Jad has said of his childhood that "I was always in the weird in-between space...being the Arab kid in a place where there are no Arabs...and conversely going back to Lebanon and being American." In our season two opener we ask Jad, how did being one of the only Lebanese kids in Tennessee set you onto the intuitive path of breakthrough audio journalism?

Why did being one of the only Lebanese kids in Tennessee set Jad Abumrad onto the path of audio journalism? How did the sound of a toilet flushing almost ruin the pilot episode of Serial? What caused Josh Thomas to black out and rant to half a million people about Grindr? 

Find the answer to these questions and more in season two of the Sydney Opera House podcast It's A Long Story. A podcast that explores the stories behind the big ideas of some of our most influential and acclaimed guests. 

Lionel Shriver is the author of 12 books. Perhaps most famously "We Need To Talk About Kevin", for which he won the Orange Prize. Born Margaret Ann in May 1957, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, as a teenager, she announced to her family that she would change her name to Lionel. A year later, she announced she would no longer be attending church with them. It has been said she writes mostly about characters who are hard to love. A series of what-if scenarios play out on her pages, troubling, confronting, often uncomfortable. "It makes me happy", she has said, "if I'm being successfully frightening." Dividing her time between New York and London, she's fiercely anti-authoritarian, a self-described Libertarian, pro-Brexit, anti-death, and it seems she doesn't have much time for the watercress and wasabi set who now populate our fast gentrifying inner-city suburbs. 

Lev Grossman is the author of five books, perhaps most notably his series beginning with "The Magicians." Described by almost every critic out there perhaps unfairly as "Harry Potter for adults." Born in June of 1969 he was introduced early to the works of C.S. Lewis and went on to spend years as a teenager playing Dungeons and Dragons. He has a day job as the book critic for Time Magazine. But lives a life engrossed in fantasy -- a passion he now shares with a legion of fans. "I bristle whenever fantasy is characterised as escapism," he says, "I think fantasy is a powerful tool for coming to an understanding of oneself."

Once described as an obscure Cambridge lecturer after a high-level academic spat on live British radio in truth Priyamvada Gopal is anything but. There are few public intellectuals who think and write on the subjects of India and colonialism with as much influence and insight. A reader with the University of Cambridge in Anglophone and related literature she has a Ph.D. from Cornell and specialises in colonial and post-colonial literature. Priya Gopal has said that "since dictators, war criminals and bankers also read Shakespeare we can't claim that literature will inevitably make society more humane and imaginative. But it does engage most people's ethical capacities." 

Alok Jha is a self-described water obsessive, a scientist and communicator; he's made an art form of unpacking some of the most complex questions of our age. A fascination with water has taken him literally to the ends of the earth. A journey to Antarctica in 2013 came close to an unfortunate end. He joins a long list of remarkable science communicators, who try to make the incomprehensible sound simple. He and his wife recently had their first child, and somewhere in between all of this, he's penned the Water Book.