The ABR Podcast

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...

This week on  The  ABR  Podcast , Tony Hughes-d’Aeth reviews On Alexis Wright by Geordie Williamson. Hughes-d’Aeth notes that Williamson mounts a spirited defence of Alexis Wright against what he terms ‘Australian philistinism’, in which the reader expects literature to ‘tell us stuff, neatly and efficiently’. Instead, Williamson suggests, Wright...

This week, on  The ABR Podcast , we feature a commentary by Florence Honybun on a ‘distinct trend’ towards progressive legalism in the Australian High Court. While Australians often look to US legal institutions to gauge the health of democracy, Honybun identifies a quieter ‘changing of the guard’ at home, and with it, &lsqu...

This week, on  The  ABR  Podcast , we feature a special commentary by Dennis Altman on the new literary scams enabled by artificial intelligence. Altman recounts the multiple emails he has received from people ‘whose lives will not be complete if they are not given the opportunity to promote one of my books … to a global audience’. These emails are purportedly fro...

This week, on  The  ABR  Podcast , Felicity Plunkett reviews  Fear Less: Poetry in perilous times , by former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. In a cultural moment when language is often ‘weaponised to cultivate division and fear’, Smith proposes a more audacious alternative: to live otherwise, refusing to succumb to ‘hot tak...

This week on  The ABR Podcast , we feature a special commentary by Simon Tedeschi on writers’ festivals. At the level below headlines, writers’ festivals have in recent years undergone a more subtle but pernicious shift, he argues. Whereas they were once sites of complex dialogue and genuine exchange, now ‘both political and literary langua...

This week, on  The ABR Podcast , Eleanor Spencer-Regan reflects on Melbourne poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s poetic career. Wallace-Crabbe made the poem ‘a space for thinking in public’, she writes. In his work, poetry is treated ‘less as statement than as real-time event: a site in which ideas are tried out rather than asserted...

This week on The ABR Podcast, Grace Roodenrys reviews they , a novel by Danish author Helle Helle. ‘The novel is a story of illness and loss but often reads as anything but,’ Roodenrys writes. There is no predominant meaning imposed on the narrative; much of its ontological poignancy stems from its small, quiet ironies. Roodenrys observes, ‘The mother is a woman who is rapidly dy...

This week on The  ABR  Podcast, Joel Deane reviews Niki Savva’s  Earthquake , an account of the 2025 Australian federal election and the role of political expediency in shaping a country. ‘Like payday loans,’ Deane writes, ‘the costs of short-term political decisions accumulate and compound’, demanding repayment. Joel Deane is a...

This week on The ABR Podcast, we feature Stephen Garton’s commentary ‘When universities mattered: Higher education in a country addicted to the plough’. ‘There was a time when Australian universities mattered. Should they again?’ asks President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and former University of Sydney Vice-Chancellor Stephen Garton in a feature asses...

This week, on The ABR Podcast , Mindy Gill reviews Dead and Alive , Zadie Smith’s latest essay collection. For Gill, Smith’s essays ‘have an uncanny habit of arriving precisely when the culture shifts’. Dead and Alive ranges across technology and digital surveillance, authorship and literature, and the erosion of public space, among other urgent concerns. Considered togethe...

This week on The ABR Podcast , Sara Webb investigates the heated debates and mind bending science of quantum physics. As Webb writes, the ‘universe exists on an unimaginable scale’, its physics strange but wondrous. Sara Webb is the inaugural ABR Science Fellow and an astrophysicist at Swinburne University of Technology. She is the author of The Little Book of Cosmic Catastrophes (2024...

This week, on The ABR Podcast , we feature a special essay by Stuart Kells, titled ‘Less an author than a milieu: Reading Shakespeare in the New World’. Kells discusses the thorny question of the authorship of the First Folio. While some devoted Shakespeareans insist that the First Folio was authored by Shakespeare, Kells points to compelling evidence that Shakespeare was instead a &ls...

In this week’s ABR Podcast we feature the shortlist for the 2026 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Now in its twenty-second year, the Porter Prize is one of the world’s leading competitions for a new poem in English. This year, our judges are Judith Bishop, ABR Poetry Editor Felicity Plunkett, and Anders Villani. The shortlisted poets are J Andros, Kirsten Krauth, Cheryl Leavy, Claire Potter,...

This week, on The ABR Podcast, Stephen Long reviews Woodside vs the Planet: How a company captured a country by Marian Wilkinson and Extractive Capitalism: How commodities and cronyism drive the global economy by Laleh Khalili. Long describes the notion that Australia can maintain its current gas exports and save the planet as a delusion, one that is increasingly adopted by our political leaders....

This week, on The ABR Podcast, James Curran reviews Turbulence: Australian foreign policy in the Trump era by Clinton Fernandes. Curran describes Turbulence as ‘an attempt to chart the coordinates of President Trump’s approach to the world’ and to explain how Australia, in ‘scrambling to remain relevant to Washington’, has become what Fernandes describes as a “U...

This week on The ABR Podcast , we feature a special essay by biographer Nadia Wheatley titled ‘Liars, inventors, embroiderers: Rewriting the life and myth of Charmian Clift’. ‘What does a biographer do’, Wheatley asks, ‘when she discovers she has something wrong?’ In Wheatley’s case, it was not something that just she had wrong, but something that her subj...