The ABR Podcast

Afleveringen

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  ‘Literary critic as democratic role model’ by Varun Ghosh 13.08.2026 10min

  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 comparison between literary critics and democratic representatives,’ Ghosh writes, ‘the habits that underpin good criticism … are also indispensable to good policymaking’. Varun Ghosh is a Senator for Western Australia and previously a lawyer from Perth. He received degrees in Arts and Law from the University of Western Australia and was a Commonwealth Scholar in Law at the University of Cambridge. Here is Varun Ghosh with ‘Literary critic as democratic role model’, published in the August issue of ABR.
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  ‘C.Q.D.’ by Laura Elvery 06.08.2026 27min

  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 judges called ‘C.Q.D.’ an ‘iceberg of a story: it carries its heft below the surface’. An irreverent mix of melodrama, time travel, and pop culture, Elvery’s story also asks ‘unexpectedly profound questions about what it means to witness, remember, and share a catastrophe’. This year’s Jolley, the sixteenth in the history of the prize, was judged by Delia Falconer, Jonathan Ricketson, and Beejay Silcox. The judges chose ‘C.Q.D.’ from a field of 1,174 entries across thirty-two countries. The Jolley Prize is worth a total of $12,500 and is for an original work of short fiction of between 2,000 and 5,000 words, written in English. Laura Elvery is the author of two short story collections, Ordinary Matter (2020), and Trick of the Light (2018), as well as a novel, Nightingale (2025), which received the 2025 People’s Choice Queensland Book of the Year Award. Here is Laura Elvery with ‘C.Q.D.’, published in the August issue of ABR.
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  ‘The architecture of erasure’ by Elise Westin 30.07.2026 19min

  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 the Holodomor memorial in Kyiv. ‘Erasure is deliberate’, she writes. Her essay is freighted with urgency: ‘When you lose a record of the past, you risk repeating its vulnerabilities.’ Elise Westin is an Australian writer whose work explores identity in the afterlives of displacement. Her poetry was longlisted for the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize, while her prose has appeared in The Saltbush Review and Kindling, and was performed at the International Association of Genocide Scholars conference. Here is Elise Westin with ‘The architecture of erasure’, published in the July issue of ABR.
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  ‘The lie and the law: The biography of a rogue’ by Lucy Sussex 23.07.2026 12min

  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 defence of George Dean, a ferryman accused of poisoning his wife, Meagher sought a second career under the lights of the political stage. Meagher was a ‘rogue’ who ‘loved that drug’ of celebrity, Sussex writes. Lucy Sussex is a lecturer at La Trobe University who has both written and edited several anthologies of short fiction. She is the author of Outrageous Fortunes: The adventures of Mary Fortune, crime-writer, and her criminal son George, published in 2025. Here is Lucy Sussex with ‘The lie and the law: The biography of a rogue’, published in the July issue of ABR.
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  ‘And yet: Towards disabled literary utopia’ by Jessica White 16.07.2026 12min

  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 writing, White notes, we are still far from an ‘accessible disabled literary utopia’. ‘In a world of increasing homogenisation,’ White points out, ‘disabled people’s writing remains a refreshing reminder of the creativity that our bodies generate.’ Jessica White is a Deaf author and academic living on Kaurna country. She has published two novels, as well as a hybrid memoir about deafness in 2019, Hearing Maud, which won the Michael Crouch Award for a début work of biography and was shortlisted for four major literary awards. Her most recent work is Silence is my Habitat: Ecobiographical essays (2025). White is Associate Professor in Creative Writing and Literary Studies at Adelaide University. Here is Jessica White with ‘And yet: Towards disabled literary utopia’, published in the July issue of ABR.
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  ‘A deeper kind of itch: Poetry of the mirrored plate’ by Lisa Gorton 05.07.2026 10min

  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’s poetry lies in the unexpected; in some images, Gorton points out, ‘lonely terror bends weirdly around to meet the companionship of old poems and dead friends’. Goldsworthy brings ‘a new voice’ to ‘the small hours, the long minutes’ of the insomniac’s night: ‘This time / it’s serious. // And more intimate./ A deeper kind // of itch.’ Lisa Gorton is a poet, novelist, and critic, and a former Poetry Editor of ABR. A Rhodes Scholar, she completed a Masters in Renaissance Literature and a Doctorate on John Donne at Oxford University, and was awarded the John Donne Society Award for Distinguished Publication in Donne Studies. Her first poetry collection, Press Release (2007), won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry. She has also been awarded the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize.
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  ‘Vulnerable to place: Navigating deep blue history’ by Killian Quigley 27.06.2026 11min

  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 ‘situated knowledge’ is increasingly valuable. While technological advancement is inevitable, Quigley urges a renewed ‘attention to the bodies that map – that sweat, are sunburnt and shark-nibbled’. ‘To be physically present in a place – and physically vulnerable to that place – is to know it in a way’ that remote technologies cannot. Killian Quigley is a teacher and senior researcher at the Australian Catholic University’s Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. He is the co-editor, with Margaret Cohen, of The Aesthetics of the Undersea, published in 2019. Here is Killian Quigley with ‘Vulnerable to place: Navigating deep blue history’, published in the June issue of ABR.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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  ‘Tumbleweed: How the West was lost’ by Maria Takolander 18.06.2026 30min

  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 else. ‘The tumbleweed is a celebrity, albeit a minor one’, Takolander writes. Maria Takolander was the inaugural winner of the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize in 2010. She is the author of four poetry collections and a book of short stories. Her début novel, The End of Romance, will be published by Text Publishing in June. The Calibre Essay Prize, now in its twentieth year, is one of the world’s leading prizes for a new non-fiction essay. Here is Maria Takolander with ‘Tumbleweed: How the West was lost’, published in the June issue of ABR.
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  ‘“One of our rarest gifts”: David Malouf in the pages of Australian Book Review’ by Carissa Chye 17.06.2026 11min

  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 enduring singularity of Malouf’s literary vision is traceable through the convergent ways critics responded to the same defining impulses in his work’. Across decades of literary dialogue and imaginative essaying,’ she writes, ‘Malouf’s work was gently pedagogic of a particular mode of careful reading’. Carissa Chye is the ABR Peter Rose Editorial Cadet. Here is Carissa Chye with ‘One of our rarest gifts’: David Malouf in the pages of Australian Book Review’, published in the June issue of ABR.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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  ‘When people ask me about the “situation” in Iran: Locating ourselves and each other through the voices of the vatan’ by Marjon Mossammaparast 04.06.2026 15min

  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 vatan – ‘political exiles, religious refugees, the imprisoned and the smuggled, emigrants, lapsed believers, patriots, atheists, the new generation’ – drifting through various communication apps, Mossammaparast captures what it means when people ask her about the ‘situation’ in Iran.
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  ‘One bad day: Meditations on commodified flesh’ by Katherine Wilson 28.05.2026 13min

  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, Wilson argues, are sensorial and experiential – vividly immersing the reader in the cultural details of bushfood foraging, for example – but Fed Up requires more exacting research and critical depth to truly trouble the field of studies it wishes to join. Ultimately, Ridge’s brand of feminism ‘narrows the scope for radical collective visions of change’, Wilson writes. Katherine Wilson is an award-winning writer, journalist, and former co-editor of Overland, whose work focuses on cultural and environmental sustainability. Her essays have appeared in Griffith Review, Meanjin, the Law Institute Journal, and Eureka Street. Here is Katherine Wilson with ‘One bad day: Meditations on commodified flesh’, published in the upcoming June issue of ABR.
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  ‘Too human: Shame, horror, aversion’ by Kevin Hart 21.05.2026 10min

  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 notes that Saltzman’s book is ‘a study not only of aversion but of transformation’. But what is the ethical implication of turning away in a ‘world of violence, pain, and grief’? ‘This is more than flinching’, Hart writes, ‘it is a reaction of horror mixed with shame.’ Kevin Hart is the Jo Wright University Distinguished Professor at Duke Divinity School. His most recent poetry collections are Carnets, published in 2025 by Cascade Press, and Firefly, just published by Pitt St Poetry in Sydney. Here is Kevin Hart with ‘Too human: Shame, horror, aversion’, published in the May issue of ABR.
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  ‘Between reality and dreams’ by Sahar Rabah 14.05.2026 23min

  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 ‘small, undeclared wars’ that are ‘not shown on television’. Moving between the speaker’s broken dreams, her nightmares, and her intimate, lived trauma, ‘Between reality and dreams’ bears powerful witness to the human cost of conflict in Gaza. Sahar Rabah writes poetry, essays, and short fiction in Arabic and English. Her poems have appeared in The Massachussetts Review, World Literature Today, LitHub, and The Markaz Review. Here is Sahar Rabah with ‘Beyond reality and dreams’, published in the May issue of ABR.
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  ‘Again and again: More poem than memoir’ by Jane Gleeson-White 08.05.2026 10min

  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 Ways of Looking, Gleeson-White notes that ‘the structure and arrangement of the text are key’, reflecting the fragmented nature of trauma. ‘This is narrative stripped to its barest bones,’ she writes, ‘more poem than memoir.’  Jane Gleeson-White is the author of four books, including Double Entry: How the merchants of Venice created modern finance, published in 2011, and its sequel, Six Capitals: Capitalism, climate change and accounting, published in 2014. Here is Jane Gleeson-White with ‘Again and again: More poem than memoir’, published in the May issue of ABR. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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  ‘Rethinking “on”: Sitting and listening to Wright’ by Tony Hughes-d’Aeth 30.04.2026 9min

  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 compels readers to ‘suspend their assumptions around what literature is or should be’. Hughes-d’Aeth commends Williamson for opening up Wright’s work: ‘More than anything,’ he observes, ‘Williamson writes in a way that makes you want to read Alexis Wright’. Tony Hughes-d’Aeth is the Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia and the Director of the Westerly Centre. He is the author of Like Nothing on this Earth: A literary history of the wheatbelt, published by the University of Western Australia Publishing, which won the Walter McRae Russell Prize for best work of Australian literary criticism in 2019. Here is Tony Hughes-d’Aeth with ‘Rethinking “on”: Sitting and listening to Wright’, published in the April issue of ABR.
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  ‘Progressive legalism in Australia’s High Court: How migration, aliens, and punishment cases reveal a distinct trend’ by Florence Honybun 23.04.2026 10min

  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, ‘a shift in the jurisprudence informing its decisions’. In a suite of recent migration cases, the Court curtailed executive power over stateless migrants, signalling a more liberal, humanitarian turn. As migration pressures intensify, Honybun argues, Australians must become more alert to the consequential role of Australia’s highest court.
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  ‘“May today sink peace into your soul”: New scams in the literary world’ by Dennis Altman 16.04.2026 6min

  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 from authors as varied as Patrick Süskind and Annie Ernaux. Apparently ‘geography places no limits on my potential fan base,’ Altman writes, ‘nor, I suspect, will mortality.’  
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  ‘Urgent compassion: Paying courageous attention’ by Felicity Plunkett 09.04.2026 12min

  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 takes and livid tirades’. Smith’s call for ‘urgent compassion’, Plunkett writes, positions poetry as a means of fostering ‘careful listening and mutual respect’. Poetry insists, Smith writes, that ‘your life must be as important to you as mine is to me’.  Felicity Plunkett is the ABR Poetry Editor and a poet and critic. Her latest work, A Kinder Sea, is published by the University of Queensland Press. Here is Felicity Plunkett with ‘Urgent compassion: Paying courageous attention’, published in the April issue of ABR.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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  ‘“Suppose I am wrong?”: On writers’ festivals, reassurance, calibration, and risk’ by Simon Tedeschi 02.04.2026 15min

  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 language ... functions to perform reassurance and calibration’. Tedeschi reflects on a broader ‘societal impatience with ambiguity’ and asks us to consider: ‘What specific cultural function is a writers’ festival intended to perform?’
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  ‘Thinking in public: The vulpine poetry of Chris Wallace-Crabbe’ by Eleanor Spencer-Regan 25.03.2026 14min

  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’. His most enduring legacy, Spencer-Regan suggests, lies in the intellectual capaciousness of this approach: one that is ‘curious, plural, generous, and ever alert to contingency’. Eleanor Spencer-Regan is an Honorary Senior Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne and the Principal of Janet-Clarke Hall, Australia’s first residential college for women. Here is Eleanor Spencer-Regan with ‘Thinking in public: The vulpine poetry of Chris Wallace-Crabbe’, published in the March issue of ABR.