The ABR Podcast

This week on the ABR Podcast, Grace Roodenrys reviews KONTRA by Eunice Andrada, observing that the collection draws on a poetics of cultural excavation. As Roodenrys explains, Andrada retrieves and rewrites the ways that women’s bodies have been framed, worshipped, and fetishised. She goes on to say that ‘KONTRA must work to resist a number of powerful aesthetic schemes – traditi...

This week, on The ABR Podcast, Jessica Whyte reviews A Philosophy of Shame: A revolutionary emotion by Frédéric Gros. Whyte applauds the attempt to ‘revolutionise how we think about shame’ and to consider shame not simply as a retrograde emotion but ‘a resource for political struggle’. But in Gros’ book, writes Whyte, there is ‘abstract quality&rsq...

This week, on The ABR Podcast, Patrick Mullins reviews Hawke PM: The making of a legend by David Day. Approaching Day’s second volume of the Hawke biography, Mullins asks: ‘how much more can there be to say?’ And, in the end, he concludes that ‘without a new perspective and questions that could throw new light on Hawke, the facts marshalled are generally too dulled by over-...

This week, on The ABR Podcast, Clare Corbould reviews The Shortest History of the United States of America by Don Watson. Corbould praises Watson’s ‘sharp observations’ and his ‘wry and knowing analysis’ but notes a ‘melancholic tone’ as he explores the United States’ slide ‘into populism and authoritarianism’. Historian Clare Corbould is...

This week on The ABR Podcast we feature Rachael Wenona Guy’s short story ‘Limerence’, which placed third in the 2025 Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. ‘Limerence’ deftly interweaves artifice and realism, narrative ellipses and unsettling meditation to create an uncanny confession. It stages a teenage girl’s obsession around the image of the dead young explorer...

This week, on The ABR Podcast, we feature Kate Fullagar’s essay ‘Questions for Mai: Joshua Reynolds’s portrait and the memory of Empire’. Fullagar delves into the history behind Joshua Reynold’s famous portrait of Mai, the first Pacific Islander to visit Britain. She considers what she calls a ‘complicated enmeshment of art, money, and national memory’ and...

This week, on The ABR Podcast, Judith Bishop reviews Empire of AI: Inside the reckless race for total domination by Karen Hao and The AI Con: How to fight Big Tech’s hype and create the future we want by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna. Bishop seeks to cut through what she sees as prevailing ‘AI doomer/boomer ideologies’, where artificial intelligence is something that will either...

This week on The ABR Podcast we feature Tracey Slaughter’s short story ‘Sediment’, which placed second in the 2025 Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. ‘Sediment’ takes the form of twenty-seven brilliant points about living and loving in a female share house. It encompasses intense casual relationships and snarks at a landlord and his rotten portfolio. The story reflec...

This week, on The ABR Podcast, we feature Sean Scalmer’s commentary ‘Albanese’s “Australian Way”: The rise of “progressive patriotism” and its complex past’. Scalmer investigates Albanese’s definition of the ‘Australian Way’, which ‘served as a touchstone on the campaign trail’, and asks what this ethos represents for th...

This week, on The ABR Podcast , we feature ‘Deeper into darkness: Iran after the twelve-day war’. Australian journalist Zoe Holman writes on life in Iran after the recent twelve-day war, investigating whether conflict brought Iranians closer to democracy or further away from it. She speaks to Iranians in the diaspora, including a London-based academic from Tehran who withheld his name...

This week, on The ABR Podcast , we feature Nathan Hollier’s commentary ‘“Come nearer to Asia”: Australia’s place at Bandung, 1955’. Seventy years after the 1955 Asian-African Conference, Hollier reflects on Australia’s official absence from this historic ‘postcolonial moment’, as well as its unofficial presence. Hollier recalls the invitation o...

This week on The ABR Podcast we feature Tara Sharman’s short story ‘Shelling’, which won the 2025 Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. In ‘Shelling’, we meet a woman in flight, driving with the corpse of her dead father stowed in the boot of her car. Stunningly written, savagely honest, this is a story about grief – the grief of losing a father, the grief of losi...

This week on the ABR Podcast, we feature Clinton Fernandes’ commentary ‘“Without undue suffering”: Japan’s August 1945 and the superweapon alibi’. On the eightieth anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, historian Clinton Fernandes delivers a gripping reassessment of the world’s only use of atomic bombs against civilians and exposes the &lsq...

This week on the ABR Podcast, Lynda Ng reviews To Save and To Destroy: Writing as an Other by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Nguyen, who arrived in the United States from Vietnam as a child refugee in 1975, is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer . To Save and To Destroy is a collection of pieces Nguyen delivered for the prestigious Norton Lectures. Ng considers Nguyen’s primary subject...

This week on the ABR Podcast, Marilyn Lake reviews After America: Australia and the new world order by Emma Shortis and Hard New World: Our post-American future (Quarterly Essay 98) by Hugh White. Lake observes that both ‘authors argue that it is time to imagine a post-American world’ and emphasise ‘the necessity of retrieving our relationship with China’. Lake applauds the...

This week on the ABR Podcast, Felicity Plunkett reviews new collections of Antigone Kefala’s poetry and fiction, observing that the belated recognition of this major Australian figure suggests that Kefala has moved beyond the designation ‘migrant writer’. ABR was this week delighted to announce that Felicity Plunkett is ABR ’s new Poetry Editor. Her latest work, A Kinder Se...

This week on the ABR Podcast we feature James Curran’s commentary ‘Balance sheet blues: The pros and cons of Pax Americana coming to an end’. Curran’s focus is the evolving relationship between Australia and America during and beyond Trump’s second administration. James Curran is a Professor of Modern History at Sydney University and International Editor at The Austra...

This week on the ABR Podcast we feature Robin Boord’s essay ‘Consolation of Clouds’, which was placed third in the 2025 Calibre Essay Prize. The essay conveys the mystery surrounding the death of a woman’s father, a pilot in the Korean War, who died unexpectedly at home after a mechanical failure on a training flight. Boord writes in poetic prose that creates narrative...

This week on the ABR podcast we feature Shan Windscript’s review of Bombard the Headquarters! by Linda Jaivin. Though Windscript applauds Jaivin for condensing the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of Communist China into a succinct and vivid account, Windscript argues this approach sacrifices historical nuance. Shan Windscript is a cultural historian of modern China and Lecturer in East...

This week on the ABR Podcast, we feature Rebecca Strating’s commentary ‘“Rejecting the system it created”: How Trump’s America is reshaping Australia’s regional relations’. While the second Trump administration presents a challenge for Australian policy makers, it also provides an opportunity for Australia, explains Strating, ‘to develop greater self...

This week on the ABR podcast we feature André Dao’s review of The Shortest History of AI by Toby Walsh. In his analysis, Dao notes an undercurrent of ‘pervasive technological solutionism’ in Walsh’s ‘core history… of technological innovations’. André Dao is a PhD candidate at the Melbourne Law School and won the Prime Minister’s Litera...

This week on the ABR Podcast we feature Natasha Sholl’s essay ‘The Chirp/The Scream’, which was the runner-up in the 2025 Calibre Essay Prize. Natasha Sholl is a writer and lapsed lawyer based in Melbourne. Her work has appeared in many publications including Australian Book Review . Her first book, Found, Wanting , was published by Ultimo Press in 2022. Her essay, ‘Hold Yo...

This week on the ABR Podcast, Kate Fullagar reviews Uprising: War in the colony of New South Wales, 1838-1844, by Stephen Gapps. Fullagar writes that Uprising is a ‘crucial contribution to our rethinking of Australian military history’. Kate Fullagar is Professor of History at Australian Catholic University, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, and Vice President of the Au...

This week on the ABR Podcast we present Peter Rose’s final Diary as Editor of Australian Book Review. Peter began editing ABR in 2001 and retired just last month. The May issue was his final issue as Editor, and in his diary entry Rose recalls. Before coming to ABR , Rose was a publisher at Oxford University Press. He has published several books of poetry, an award-winning family memoir,&nbs...

This week on the ABR Podcast, we are delighted to present the winning essay in the 2025 Calibre Essay Prize: ‘Eucharist’ by Jeanette Mrozinski, who becomes the first American essayist to win the prestigious award. Jeanette Mrozinski has worked as a stripper and government bureaucrat, bakery girl and communications director, factory labourer, yoga instructor, and journalist. An MFA cand...