The ABR Podcast

This week on The ABR Podcast , André Dao reviews Richard Flanagan’s Heresies , observing that one reason to read the essay collection ‘is to watch a master rhetorician at work’, one who is deeply engaged in current political issues. But, Dao insists, there is a cost, ‘or at least a potential cost, to writing in this register’. What is lost, Dao asks, when we ta...

This week on The ABR Podcast , Nadia Wheatley reviews Sisters in Arms by Sarah Cochrane Ridout, the ‘powerful’ story of two Australian women who worked tirelessly to campaign for constitutional change in the 1967 referendum: Kath Walker, who later changed her name to Oodgeroo Noonuccal, and Kathie Cochrane. With its story of female resilience, creativity, and enduring friendship, Ridou...

This week on The ABR Podcast , Anthony Macris reviews Rachel Cusk’s fictional autobiography, Life of M , finding it ‘particularly strange and compelling’. Interrogating the uncomfortable relationship between selfhood and celebrity, Cusk’s novel questions how human identity ‘warps and buckles under pressure’. Life of M is a novel that makes an ‘enigma&rsquo...

This week on The ABR Podcast , Emma Dawson surveys Bernard Keane’s  Seize the Moment , in which Keane grapples with the 2025 Australian federal election result. Australia handed the Albanese government a huge majority in that election and, Dawson writes, ‘disproved the assumptions that have underpinned Keane’s political analysis for years’. Keane presents merely a...

This week on The ABR Podcast , Cheryl Leavy reviews Julie Janson’s ‘unsettling and powerful’ poetry collection, My Kaathi Sister , calling it a brand of truth-telling that is ‘embodied, tactile, and troubling’, but ‘never performative’. Janson’s work positions the reader as ‘outcry witness’, Leavy writes, pushing them ‘to the edge o...

This week on The ABR Podcast , Peter Goldsworthy shares a poignant account of writing sonnets by a Brisbane poolside in 1987 with the late poet Gwen Harwood and author Vikram Seth. One of Australia’s greatest poets, Harwood was to her friend and fellow poet Goldsworthy an ‘impish, irreverent devil’ whose correspondence over many years, including in her final months, he recently d...

Today’s episode marks a collaboration between ABR and The Nature Conservancy’s Nature Writing Prize as ABR becomes Media Partner of the prize. In the episode, we consider the notion that the way we write about nature shapes the way we see it, value it, and act on its behalf. The eighth biennial Nature Writing Prize is now open, and the winning essay, which attracts prize money of $8,00...

This week on The ABR Podcast , we feature the third-place winner of the 2026 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, ‘Peach’ by Ursula Brunetti. In Brunetti’s riveting coming-of-age story, an exchange student’s stay in the French countryside becomes increasingly tense when she discovers her host’s sister has a life-threatening eating disorder. This year’s judges...

This week on The ABR Podcast , Virginia Haussegger reviews Women Who Win by Antoinette Lattouf, a book that is not about ‘the anatomy of winning’, but rather about ‘the impact of fighting’. Using her well-known legal case against the ABC as a narrative framework, Lattouf unfolds the stories of over forty ‘unyielding, unbowed’ women who dared to take on ‘po...

This week on The ABR Podcast , we feature ‘Backflip’ by New Zealand author Sam Keenan, which placed second in the 2026 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Set in a small New Zealand town in the 1980s, ‘Backflip’ tells the story of a young girl’s disappearance and the community’s attempt to smooth over this tragedy. This year’s judges called ‘Back...

This week, on The ABR Podcast , we feature WA Senator Varun Ghosh’s essay, ‘Literary critic as democratic role model’, which discusses the relationship between literary criticism and politics. Ghosh argues that literary critique is crucial to the health of democracy. ‘A strong critical culture is protective of democracy’, he asserts. While there are limits to the comp...

This week on The ABR Podcast , we feature the winner of the 2026 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, ‘C.Q.D.’ by Laura Elvery. The young narrator of ‘C.Q.D.’ is on board the  Carpathia  in the year 1912. The ship is racing towards the  Titanic  after hearing its distress signal. Will it reach the  Titanic  in time? This year’s Jolley...

This week on The ABR Podcast , we feature Elise Westin’s essay, titled ‘The architecture of erasure’. The third-place winner of the 2026 Calibre Essay Prize, ‘The architecture of erasure’ merges personal intimacy with an examination of the systematic Soviet erasure of Ukrainians. Westin recounts her inability to find records of her great-grandparents’ names at t...

This week on  The ABR Podcast , Lucy Sussex reviews The Stained Man by Patrick Mullins, a biography of the first Labor Lord Mayor of Sydney, Richard Meagher. Mullins’s book is a ‘genuinely riveting and fascinating’ account of Meagher’s ‘mania for restitution’ following his scandalous errors of judgement as a prominent lawyer. Disbarred after his unethical d...

This week, on The ABR Podcast , Jessica White reviews Crip Stories: An anthology of disabled writers that attempts to ‘represent as wide a variety of multiply marginalised disabled experiences as possible’. The writing collected in this book is multivalent, taking a ‘welcome intersectional approach to anthologising’. Yet, despite growing interest in disabled people’s...

This week on The ABR Podcast , we feature Clinton Fernandes’s commentary titled ‘“Depths that we today are barely able to imagine”: The quality of disinterestedness on the 250th anniversary of the United States of America’. Noting that the Trump Cabinet is ‘the wealthiest in modern history, with thirteen billionaires and a combined net worth of US$60 billion&rsq...

This week on The ABR Podcast , Lisa Gorton reviews Tomorrow by Peter Goldsworthy. A poetic companion to Goldsworthy’s ‘expansive, thoughtful’ memoir The Cancer Finishing School , Tomorrow braids the everyday experience with the ironic, the meaningful, the terrifying: the poetry ‘charges familiar things with terror’, Gorton writes. But the strength of Goldsworthy&rsquo...

This week, on The ABR Podcast , we feature Killian Quigley’s review of Plotting the Oceans: Stories of powerful maps and their makers by Sarah Hamylton. Hamylton’s sharp insights emerge from her deeply embodied knowledge of her environment, Quigley asserts. In an era where ‘drones, algorithms, and artificial intelligence are transforming how maps are made’, such ‘situ...

This week on The ABR Podcast , we feature the runner-up in the 2026 Calibre Essay Prize, titled ‘Tumbleweed: How the West was Lost’, by Maria Takolander. Wide-ranging and delightfully digressive, Takolander’s encyclopaedic essay uses the modest tumbleweed as a lens through which to examine Western mythology, colonial violence, environmental crises, and Tsarist Russia, among much...

This week on The ABR Podcast , we feature Carissa Chye’s essay on David Malouf, titled ‘One of our rarest gifts’. A retrospective piece on ABR ’s rich, generative relationship with Malouf, Chye’s essay recalls how Malouf’s ‘work and presence animated the literary life of the journal’. Taking us through the ABR archive, Chye observes that ‘the e...

This week on  The ABR Podcast , we feature Marjon Mossammaparast’s essay, titled ‘When people ask me about the “situation” in Iran’. She traces the complicated relationship of diasporic Iranians to their  vatan , ‘primarily the site of belonging and memory, akin to Country’. Listening to the scattered voices of her  ...

This week on The ABR Podcast , Katherine Wilson reviews ‘ Fed Up: A chef’s adventures in food, farming and feminism ’ by Lucy Ridge. Partially a memoir of Ridge’s disillusionment with a food industry that regards food as ‘little more than vehicles for profit’, the book also seeks to situate itself in conversation with feminist food scholarship. Its strengths, Wi...

This week on The ABR Podcast , Kevin Hart reviews Turning Away: The poetics of an ancient gesture by Benjamin Saltzman. Saltzman examines our instinct to ‘turn away, whenever we are faced with death, grief, helplessness, loss, and pain’. He traces the representation of this elemental human gesture from literary classics and ancient artwork to modern films, plays, and narratives. Hart n...

This week, on The ABR Podcast , we feature Sahar Rabah’s winning essay from the 2026 Calibre Essay Prize, ‘Beyond reality and dreams’. The Calibre Essay Prize, now in its twentieth year, is one of the world’s leading prizes for an original essay in English. Rabah, who grew up in Gaza and left late last year, takes us behind the livestreamed mass destruction in Gaza to the &...

This week, on  The ABR Podcast , Jane Gleeson-White reviews Erin Vincent’s memoir  Fourteen Ways of Looking . Vincent’s parents were killed suddenly in an accident when she was fourteen, and the number would go on to shape and govern the narrative of her new memoir. Commenting on the strikingly poetic form of  Fourteen Wa...