The ABR Podcast: Recent Episodes

The ABR Podcast

Welcome to The ABR Podcast, produced by Australian Book Review. Released every Thursday, The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary. Subscribe on iTunes, Google, or Spotify Podcasts, or whichever app you use to listen to your favourite podcasts.

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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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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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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.

‘The lie and the law: The biography of a rogue’ by Lucy Sussex is published in the July issue of ABR.

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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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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.

Here is Lisa Gorton with ‘A deeper kind of itch: Poetry of the mirrored plate’, published in the July issue of ABR.

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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.

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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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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.

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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.

Marjon Mossammaparast’s latest volume of poetry And to Ecstasy, published by Upswell in 2022, was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Award in 2023. Her début collection, That Sight (Cordite, 2018), won the 2019 Mary Gilmore Award and was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. Mossammaparast was born in Abadan, Iran, in the year of the Islamic Revolution. Here is Marjon Mossammaparast with ‘When people ask me about the “situation” in Iran: Locating ourselves and each other through the voices of the vatan’, published in the June issue of ABR.

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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.

‘One bad day: Meditations on commodified flesh’ by Katherine Wilson is published in the upcoming June issue of ABR.

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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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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 Massachusetts 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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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.

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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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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.

Florence Honybun is a recent alumnus of Monash University and a former intern at ABR. She is currently a graduate at law at a national Australian law firm. Here is Florence Honybun with ‘Progressive legalism in Australia’s High Court: How migration, aliens, and punishment cases reveal a distinct trend’, published in the April issue of ABR.

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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.’

Dennis Altman is a Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at La Trobe University. His most recent book is Righting My World: Essays from the past half-century, published by Monash University Publishing in 2025. Here is Dennis Altman with ‘“May today sink peace into your soul”: New scams in the literary world’, published in the April issue of ABR.

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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.

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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?’

Simon Tedeschi won the ABR Calibre Essay Prize for his essay ‘This Woman My Grandmother’, and he is the author of Fugitive (2022). Here is Simon Tedeschi with ‘“Suppose I am wrong?”: On writers’ festivals, reassurance, calibration, and risk’, published in the April issue of ABR.

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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.

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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 dying. The daughter is a girl whose mother will soon be dead. Yet neither knows how to actually be these things’.

Grace Roodenrys is a writer and critic from Sydney. Her work has appeared in Meanjin, Cordite, Rabbit, The Saturday Paper, and elsewhere. Here is Grace Roodenrys with ‘Roads to roads: Bathos of the ordinary’, published in the March issue of ABR.

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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 speechwriter, novelist, and poet. He has worked in newspapers, television, and politics in Australia and the United States. He is the co-author of Making Progress: How good policy happens, published in 2025 by Melbourne University Publishing. Here is Joel Deane with ‘Lemmings over a cliff: On political and publishing expediency’, published in the March issue of ABR.

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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 assessing the state of knowledge production in Australia. As the government sets about creating a new body to oversee higher education, Garton says the conversation about education should extend beyond the question, ‘Are you job ready?’ Here is Stephen Garton with ‘When universities mattered: Higher education in a country addicted to the plough’, published in the March issue of ABR.

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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 together, ‘these essays reveal continuities otherwise invisible when read in isolation: a set of preoccupations that cut across ostensibly tangential subjects’.

Mindy Gill was ABR’s 2021 Rising Star. A poet, critic, and former editor-in-chief of Peril magazine, Gill is an Associate Lecturer of Creative Writing at Queensland University of Technology. She has won the Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award and the Tom Collins Poetry Prize. Her collection of poems, August Burns the Sky, was shortlisted for the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. Here is Mindy Gill with ‘Thought’s tempo: Essays that imagine otherwise’, published in the January-February issue of ABR.

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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), was made a Superstar of STEM in 2022, and was chosen as a Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 in Science & Healthcare in 2025. She specialises in AI-driven transient astronomy, applying machine learning to large-scale survey data to uncover fast cosmic events. Here is Sara Webb with ‘A truly probabilistic universe: One hundred years of heated debate and mind-bending physics’, published in the December 2025 issue of ABR.

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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 ‘middle stage in a multi-step dramaturgical production process’. ‘Shakespeare is not a hoax,’ Kells observes, ‘but he is hoaxy.’

Stuart Kells is Enterprise Fellow at the Melbourne Institute, University of Melbourne, and an Adjunct Professor at La Trobe University’s College of Arts, Social Sciences and Commerce. He is the author of many books, including Shakespeare’s Library: Unlocking the greatest mystery in literature. Here is Stuart Kells with ‘Less an author than a milieu: Reading Shakespeare in the New World’, published in the December issue of ABR.

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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, and Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet. The five shortlisted poems appear in the January/February 2026 issue of Australian Book Review, which is on sale now.

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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. In fact, Woodside and the LNG industry at large have a business model, Long explains, that is ‘based on climate catastrophe’.

Stephen Long is a journalist who specialises in investigative reporting, analysis, and commentary. He is a winner of the Walkley Award, the Citigroup Award for Economic and Financial Journalism, and the Commonwealth Media Award. Here is Stephen Long with ‘Carbon bomb: Business models based on climate catastrophe’, published in the December issue of ABR.

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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 “US sentinel state”.

James Curran is Professor of Modern History at Sydney University and foreign affairs columnist for the Australian Financial Review. His books include Australia's China Odyssey: From euphoria to fear (2022) and he recently delivered a prestigious Boyer lecture, titled ‘Trump’s Gift’. Here is James Curran with ‘Skewering AUKUS: A point-by-point account’, published in the December issue of ABR.

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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 subject, Charmian Clift, also had very wrong about her mother, Amy Lila Currie. It was, in fact, a great big secret, the knowledge of which recasts the life of both Amy and Charmian, as Wheately explains.

Nadia Wheatley is the author of The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift, which won The Age Non-fiction Book of the Year in 2001 and the Australian History Prize at the New South Wales Premier’s History Awards in 2002. She is also the editor of Sneaky Little Revolutions: Selected essays of Charmian Clift (2022) and Clift’s previously unpublished autobiographical novel, The End of the Morning (2024). Here is Nadia Wheatley with ‘Liars, inventors, embroiderers: Rewriting the life and myth of Charmain Clift’, published in the December issue of ABR.

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This week on the ABR Podcast, Grace Roodenrys reviews KONTRA by Eunice Andrada, observing that the collectiondraws 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 – traditions of writing and imagining women in which they wind up silent, grateful, holy, or dead.’

Grace Roodenrys is a writer and critic from Sydney. Her work has appeared in Meanjin, Cordite, Rabbit, The Saturday Paper, and elsewhere. Here is Grace Roodenrys with ‘Understand me now: Poetry which cuts into the work’, published in the November issue of ABR.

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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’ to this discussion and, she says, the pressing question that is not answered by the book is ‘how shame could generate a response to today’s shameless violence’. Jessica Whyte is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Law at the University of New South Wales and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. Her third book, Shameless Inhumanity, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Here is Jessica Whyte with ‘For shame: Social value of an emotion’, published in the November issue of ABR.

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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-familiarity to gleam’. Patrick Mullins is a winner of the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction and the National Biography Award. Here is Patrick Mullins with ‘“Carte blanche from me”: Volume two in a PM biography’, published in the November issue of ABR.

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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 Associate Head of School (Research) in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University. Here is Clare Corbould with ‘On so many levels: A sharp yet melancholic account’, published in the November issue of ABR.

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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 and sailor John Torrington and life in a conservative town in an island state. The staging is paced, powerful, and evocative. That this death obsession makes life almost bearable for the girl marks the trysts and autopsies of social alienation and colonial legacies.

Rachael Wenona Guy creates writing, visual art, and performance. Her writing has appeared in numerous Australian and international journals and anthologies including Overland, Sleepers Almanac, Australian Poetry Journal, Australian Poetry Anthology, and most recently Raging Grace, an anthology of collaborative writing on disability. Walleah Press published her début poetry collection, The Hungry Air, in 2020. She is currently working on a new collection of experimental poetic memoir to be published in 2026. Here is ‘Limerence’, by Rachael Wenona Guy, published in the August issue of ABR.

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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 investigates the portrait’s place in the British Empire. Kate Fullagar is Professor of History at Australian Catholic University, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, and Vice President of the Australian Historical Association. Here is Kate Fullagar with ‘Questions for Mai: Joshua Reynolds’s portrait and the memory of Empire’, published in the October issue of ABR.

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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 save us, or kill us. Judith Bishop is the 2024-2026 Tracey Banivanua Mar Fellow at La Trobe University and is writing a book about AI and human data. Here is Judith Bishop with ‘AI will kill us/save us: Hype and harm in the new economic order’, published in the October issue of ABR.

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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 reflects on being young, poor, and wild, and is frenetically evocative of contemporary urban lives and their characteristic insecurity. The language is fresh while confronting and dismantling of conventions, offering an affront to widely accepted middle-class mores.

Tracey Slaughter is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist from Aotearoa New Zealand. She was a previous runner up in the 2018 Peter Porter Poetry Prize and won the 2024 Calibre Essay Prize. With this short story, Slaughter becomes the first person to have placed in all three ABR prizes. Here is ‘Sediment’ by Tracey Slaughter, published in the August issue of ABR.

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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 the Labor government, particularly in the context of Australia’s complex history of labour reform. Sean Scalmer is Professor of History at the University of Melbourne and his latest book is A Fair Day’s Work: The quest to win back time. Here is Sean Scalmer with ‘Albanese’s “Australian Way”: The rise of “progressive patriotism” and its complex past’, published in the October issue of ABR.

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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 for security reasons, about his concerns around regime change through conflict. Many Iranians think ‘any regime is better than this one’, he reflects, ‘but we can always go deeper into darkness. I don’t want to replace a theocratic regime with a secular but proto-fascist one.’

Zoe Holman is a journalist, writer, and poet whose work has appeared in outlets including The Economist, the Guardian, London Review of Books, and Jacobin. She is the author of Where the Water Ends: Seeking refuge in Fortress Europe. Here is Zoe Holman with ‘Deeper into darkness: Iran after the twelve-day war’, published in the September issue of ABR.

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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 of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to Australia, to ‘come closer to Asia’. ‘Seventy years on,’ he says, ‘Nehru’s invitation still calls to us, however faintly.’

Nathan Hollier is Manager of The Australian National University Press and co-editor of Profiles in courage: Political actors & ideas in contemporary Asia.Here he is with ‘“Come nearer to Asia”: Australia’s place at Bandung, 1955.’, published in the September issue of ABR.

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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 losing a childhood, the grief of having to live beyond a state of innocence.

Tara Sharman, at twenty-two years old, becomes the youngest winner of an ABR prize. Here is ‘Shelling’ by Tara Sharman, published in the August issue of ABR.

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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 ‘superweapon alibi’ that enabled a politically convenient end to World War II for both the United States and Japan. Fernandes draws on Japanese archives referring to the bombs as ‘heaven sent’ and ‘gifts from the gods’, as well as US government reports that they were dropped ‘without undue suffering’. He argues that nuclear weapons facilitate new geopolitical realities – ones we should be cognisant of as Australia invests further in AUKUS. Here is Clinton Fernandes with ‘“Without undue suffering”: Japan’s August 1945 and the superweapon alibi’, published in the August issue of ABR.

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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 – the category of otherness – and what ‘it means for such a significant part of the population to be continuously singled out and labelled as “other”’. Lynda Ng is a Lecturer in World Literature (including Australian Literature) at the University of Melbourne. She is the editor of Indigenous Transnationalism: Essays on Carpentaria (2018). Here is Lynda Ng with ‘Other Orientalisms: Refusing to be spectacle’, published in the August issue of ABR.

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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 these authors for their ‘specifically Australian perspective and vantage point’ and conclusion that ‘Australia find its security not from Asia but in Asia’.

Marilyn Lake is an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Her most recent book is Progressive New World: How settler colonialism and TransPacific exchange shaped American reform (Harvard University Press, 2019). Here is Marilyn Lake with ‘Dogged pursuit: Australia’s “America first” policy’, published in the August issue of ABR.

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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 Sea, is published by UQP. Listen to Felicity Plunkett with ‘Some undefined peace: Moving beyond “migrant writer”, published in the July issue of ABR.

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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 Australian Financial Review. Listen to James Curran’s commentary, published in the July issue of ABR.

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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 movement through a gradual succession of images connected by the recurring motif of sliding, strange, penetrable clouds.

Robin Boordhas worked as a theatre director and a psychologist. Her novel manuscript Out of Place was shortlisted for the Unpublished Manuscript Award in the 2024 South Australian Literary Awards. Here is Robin Boord with ‘Consolation of Clouds’, published in the July issue of ABR.

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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 Asian History at Monash University. Listen to Shan Windscript with ‘Mao’s mango: Cultural Revolution as history or farce’,published in the July issue of ABR

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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-reliance in foreign policy and deepen relationships across Asia’. But what are leaders across Asia concerned about and how are they responding to the Trump administration? Strating provides a survey, noting that ‘most Southeast Asian nations have so far opted for hedging strategies that maintain relationships with multiple partners’.

Rebecca Strating is Director of La Trobe Asia and was this year awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in recognition of her contributions to the fields of strategic defence and international relations. Her most recent book, Girt by Sea: Re-imagining Australia’s security, was published by Black Inc. in 2024. Here is Rebecca Strating with ‘“Rejecting the system it created”: How Trump’s America is reshaping Australia’s regional relations’, published in the June issue of ABR.

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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 Literary Award for Fiction, among other prizes, for his debut novel Anam (2023). Listen to André Dao with ‘A Worse World: History from the future’, published in the June issue of ABR.

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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 Your Nerve’, was runner-up in the 2024 Calibre Essay Prize. Listen to Natasha Sholl with ‘The Chirp/The Scream’, published in the June issue of ABR.

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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 Australian Historical Association. Her most recent book is Bennelong & Phillip: A History Unravelled. Listen to Kate Fullagar with ‘Method and message: Rethinking Australian military history’, published in the June issue of ABR.

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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, Rose Boys, and two novels. His latest poetry collection is Attention, Please! published in February this year. As a critic, Rose has written for a variety of publications, including ABR. He also writes and performs short absurdist plays with The Highly Strung Players. Here is Peter Rose with his ‘Diary’, published in the May issue of ABR.

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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 candidate in non-fiction at Washington University in St Louis, she writes about labour, class, and self-worth. Listen to Jeanette Mrozinski with ‘Eucharist’, published in the May issue of ABR.

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This week, on the ABR Podcast, Catriona Menzies-Pike reviews The Cancel Culture Panic by Adrian Daub. Menzies-Pike examines Daub’s claim that fear of cancel culture is a US export – as ubiquitous as McDonald’s and Kentucky bourbon. She writes: ‘Cancel culture is now everywhere … What Daub does in this book is trace the origins of the cancel culture panic, registering its defining contradictions.’ Catriona Menzies-Pike was the Editor of the Sydney Review of Books between 2015 and 2023 and was awarded the Pascall Prize for arts criticism in 2023. Here is Catriona Menzies-Pike with ‘Little morality plays: Disingenuous angst over cancel culture’, published in the April issue of ABR.

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This week, on The ABR Podcast, Miles Pattenden reviews Hope: The autobiography

by Pope Francis. It is not every day that a pope writes a tell-all. Pattenden explains: ‘Of Pope Francis’s predecessors, only that preening Renaissance man of letters Pius II Piccolomini contributed to the genre directly.’ Miles Pattenden specialises in the history of the Catholic Church and his books include Pius IV and the Fall of the Carafa. Here is Miles Pattenden with ‘Barefoot in the snow: Of poetics and papacy’, published in the April issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast, Ebony Nilsson unearths the letters that Robert Menzies received from the Australian public during the 1950s Petrov Affair. Letters included everything from warnings to exhalations of relief to expressions of concern for the Petrovs’ dog. Ebony Nilsson is a historian of migration and security during the Cold War and the author of Displaced Comrades: Politics and Surveillance in the Lives of Soviet Refugees in the West. Listen to ‘“Congratulations Bob”: The Petrov Affair and the Australian public’, published in the March issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast, we bring you a special poetry feature. With Editor Peter Rose’s imminent departure from Australian Book Review and the publication this month of his seventh poetry collection, Attention, Please! (Pitt Street Poetry), eighteen poets and critics read from Peter Rose’s extensive body of work, dating back to 1990. Readers include Sarah Holland-Batt, Lisa Gorton, John Kinsella, Felicity Plunkett, Morag Fraser, Geoff Page, John Hawke, and Peter Rose himself.

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This week on The ABR Podcast we feature a short story from the ABR Archive. The story, ‘A Body of Water’ by Else Fitzgerald, was commended in the 2011 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story prize. It opens in the desolate, quiet space of a former steel town on the Franklin River. Fitzgerald writes: ‘The town hunkers on the southernmost tip of a cruel spit of land stretching down into the Bite, surrounded by the cold ocean.’ Listen to Else Fitzgerald with ‘A Body of Water’, first published in ABR in 2012 and now part of ABR’s extensive digital archive going back to 1978 – all available to subscribers.

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This week on The ABR Podcast, Christopher Allen reviews James Fairfax: Portrait of a collector in eleven objects by Alexander Edward Gilly. James Fairfax, who was born in 1933 and died in 2017, was born into the ‘greatest press dynasty Australia had yet seen’. Christopher Allen is the national art critic for The Australian. Listen to Christopher Allen’s ‘“Subject to his birth”: The biography of a prince’, published in the January-February issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast we feature a short story from the ABR archive. The story, ‘Joan Mercer’s Fertile Head’ by S.J. Finn, was commended in the 2018 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story prize. (The 2025 Jolley Short Story Prize is now open!) S.J. Finn is an Australian writer based in Melbourne. Listen to ‘Joan Mercer’s Fertile Head’, first published in ABR in 2018 and now part of ABR’s extensive digital archive going back to 1978.

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This week on The ABR Podcast, Matthew Lamb reviews Character Limit: How Elon Musk destroyed Twitter, as told by award-winning investigative journalists Kate Conger and Ryan Mac. Noting Musk’s tendency to favour ‘the virtual over the physical world’, the book gives a ‘blow-by-blow’ account of Musk’s shortcomings while leading X. Matthew Lamb is a writer and the author of Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths. Listen to Matthew Lamb’s ‘Let That Sink In!: Fantasy without consequence at Twitter’ published in the January-February issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast, historian Mark Finnane asks: ‘who gets the right to speak on matters of research within a tradition of empirical scholarship?’ Mark Finnaneis a Professor of History at Griffith University and has published widely on Australian and Irish history. Listen to Mark Finnane’s ‘Citational Justice:A revolution in research practice?’, published in the January-February issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast, Georgina Arnott discusses the dilemmas of writing an entry on Judith Wright for the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Georgina Arnott is the author of The Unknown Judith Wright, editor of Judith Wright: Selected Writings, and Assistant Editor at ABR. Listen to Georgina Arnott’s ‘“Shimmering multiple and multitude”: Keeping up with Judith Wright’, published in the January-February issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast, Toby Davidson marks the centenary of Francis Webb with an essay on the poet. Toby Davidson is the editor of Francis Webb’s Collected Poems and a senior lecturer at Macquarie University. Listen to Toby Davidson with ‘The gold standard: The centenary of Francis Webb’, published in the January-February issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast James Ley reviews Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. For Ley, it is her most ambitious novel to date. James Ley is an essayist and literary critic. Listen to James Ley with ‘”Futile rage at nothing”: Sally Rooney’s most ambitious work to date’, published in the December issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast Jonathan Ricketson reviews The Season by Helen Garner. Ricketson explains that The Season is a memoir of Garner watching her grandson ‘Amby play for the Flemington Juniors in the Under-16s, from February to August 2023’. The experience involves an effacement of self, the grandmother on the sidelines rendered a ‘silent witness’. Jonathan Ricketson is completing a PhD in Creative Writing at Monash University, where he is working on a novel. Here is Jonathan Ricketson with ‘Silent witness: A ‘little life-hymn’ from Helen Garner’, published in the December issue of ABR.

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OnThe ABR Podcast this week, Robyn Arianrhod reviews Nexus: A brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari. Under the category ‘information networks’, Harari puts oral stories, clay tablets, chalkboards, newspapers, computers and more. Arianrhod writes: ‘Harari aims to illustrate these dilemmas so that we … are better prepared to handle the AI revolution’. Robyn Arianrhod is an Affiliate in Monash’s School of Mathematics and the author of Vector: A surprising story of space, time, and mathematical transformation. Listen to Robyn Arianrhod’s ‘Out of the loop:Relaying information across time’, published in the November issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast, Marilyn Lake reviews The Art of Power: My story as America’s first woman Speaker of the House by Nancy Pelosi. The Art of Power, explains Lake, tells how Pelosi, ‘a mother of five and a housewife from California’, became the first woman Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. Marilyn Lake is a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Listen to Marilyn Lake’s ‘Where is Nancy?’ Paradoxes in the pursuit of freedom’, published in the November issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast, Josh Bornstein discusses corporate cancel culture. Bornstein argues that ‘Companies now routinely censor their employees far more repressively than any liberal democratic government does’. Josh Bornstein is an award-winning workplace lawyer and writer. His first book, Working for the Brand: How corporations are destroying free speech was recently published by Scribe. Listen to Josh Bornstein’s ‘Feeding the beast: On corporate cancel culture’, published in the November issues of ABR.

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This week, on The ABR Podcast, Paul Giles reviews Juice by Tim Winton. Juice represents a creative sidestep for the four-time Miles Franklin Award recipient, being both his longest novel and his first venture into speculative fiction. Paul Giles is Professor of English at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne. Listen to Paul Giles with ‘”Schooled in doubleness”:Tim Winton’s enthralling new novel’, published in the November issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast, Johanna Leggatt reviews Australia’s Pandemic Exceptionalism: How we crushed the curve but lost the race by Steven Hamilton and Richard Holden. Leggatt quotes from the book: ‘There will be another pandemic. It might not happen for another century, or it might happen very soon.’ Johanna Leggatt is a Melbourne-based writer and journalist. Listen to Johanna Leggatt’s ‘We right to go?’ Heeding the lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic’, published in the October issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast, Michael Winkler reviews Chinese Postman by Brian Castro. ‘Reading Castro for plot is like listening to Bob Dylan for melody,’ says Winkler of the prize-winning author of eleven novels. Michael Winkler was the winner of the 2016 Calibre Essay Prize and is the author of Grimmish. Listen to Michael Winkler’s ‘Giving up mirrors: Brian Castro’s soaring stridulation’, published in the October issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast, Bridget Griffen-Foley reviews The Men Who Killed the News: The inside story of how media moguls abused their power, manipulated the truth and distorted democracy by Eric Beecher. Bridget Griffen-Foley is the founder of the Centre for Media History at Macquarie University and has recently co-edited the fifth edition of The Media and Communications in Australia. Listen to Bridget Griffen-Foley’s ‘Quicksand:Notes from a media outsider and insider’, published in the October issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast, Seumas Spark takes us to Papua New Guinea, the country of his childhood. Spark describes returning to an independent PNG as an historian and tour guide, and the noticeable cooling of Australian attitudes to the place and its ‘intoxicating possibilities’. Listen to Seumas Spark’s ‘Drinking from coconuts: When Australians weren’t scared of Papua New Guinea’, published in the October issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast we reflect on the occupation and liberation of East Timor twenty-five years on from that extraordinary rupture. Clinton Fernandes draws on secret records released last month showing attempts by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) to change the Australian War Memorial’s history of East Timor. Clinton Fernandesis Professor of International and Political Studies at the University of New South Wales. Listen to Clinton Fernandes’s ‘History without vexed issues: Liquidating our memories of East Timor’, published in the October issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast Geordie Williamson reviews Highway 13, a collection of short stories by Fiona McFarlane. Each story is concerned with murder, that ‘ultimate de-creative act’, and might be thought of as true crime, given the real-world familiarity of characters, places, plots. Geordie Williamson is a literary critic, editor and the author of The Burning Library: Our greatest novelists lost and found. Listen to Geordie Williamson’s ‘A chorus of souls: Fiona McFarlane’s discursive theodicy’, published in the September issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast, Jeremy Martens reviews They Called It Peace: Worlds of imperial violence by Lauren Benton. The book examines what Benton terms imperial ‘small wars’, those conflicts which have historically not figured in war museums or national histories, but were nonetheless lethal and, explains Martens, ‘characterised settler empires across the globe, including in Australia’. Jeremy Martens is Chair of the Department of Classical and Historical Studies at the University of Western Australia. Listen to Jeremy Martens’s ‘Raid and truce: Private violence and imperial conquest’, published in the September issue of ABR.

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This week on The ABR Podcast, Kevin Bell addresses the crisis in housing in Australia – a crisis which he says is at risk of ‘turning into a social and economic catastrophe’. Kevin Bell is a self-described baby boomer who, in his role as a Supreme Court judge, wrote a number of influential judgments on human rights and housing. He is a former director of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law and commissioner of the Yoorrook Justice Commission. Listen to Kevin Bell’s ‘On our moral watch: The disgrace of homelessness in Australia’, published in the September issue of ABR.

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This week on the ABR Podcast, Joel Deane considers the black and white politics of opposition leader Peter Dutton. Deane explains that Dutton considers these politics a ‘police trait’ that he developed while in the force, and one that now serves him well in politics, especially when making necessary snap judgements. But will this style endear him to the electorate in the next election campaign, likely fought against Prime Minister Anthony Albanese? Joel Deane is a speechwriter, novelist and poet. Listen to Joel Deane’s ‘The Manichaean Candidate:Peter Dutton’s black and white politics’, published in the September issue of ABR.

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This week on the ABR Podcast, Paul Kane marks the centenary of James Baldwin with an essay on this indispensable prophet. Kane tells us: ‘Baldwin insisted that the only way forward, the only way out [for America], was through a renovation of the self, and this could only be accomplished through deep communication and empathy’. Paul Kane is Professor Emeritus as Vassar College in upstate New York. Listen to Paul Kane’s ‘James Baldwin this time: The centenary of an indispensable prophet’, published in the August issue of ABR.

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This week on the ABR Podcast we conclude our three-episode special on the 2024 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize with the winning story, ‘Pornwald’ by Jill Van Epps. The judges described ‘Pornwald’ as ‘a puzzle that tests the limits of realism with an often riotously deadpan sense of humour’. Jill Van Epps is a writer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn who is completing her first novel. Here is Jill Van Epps with ‘Pornwald’, published in the August issue of ABR.

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This week on the ABR Podcast, we continue to celebrate the 2024 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize with the second of three episodes featuring the shortlist. This week’s story is ‘M.’ by Shelley Stenhouse. The judges had this to say about ‘M.’: ‘Wittily told, this rollicking tale set in New York City is at once a character study of the garrulous oddball M and a tragicomic portrait of the narrator herself, whose compulsions and choices see her avoiding the everyday joys of her life as a mother.’ Shelley Stenhouse, a New York City-based poet and fiction writer, recently won the Palette Poetry Prize. Listen to ‘M.’, published in the August issue of ABR.

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Beginning this week on the ABR Podcast, we celebrate the 2024 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize shortlist over three episodes. In each episode, one of the three shortlisted authors will read their story – also published in the August issue of ABR. The overall winner of the Jolley Prize will be announced at an event at Gleebooks in Sydney on August 15. Proceeding in alphabetical order, Episode One features Kerry Greer’s ‘First Snow’.

The judges had this to say about ‘First Snow’:

‘First Snow’ subtly enacts a vulnerable young woman’s decision to leave her self-absorbed, manipulative partner, the father of her baby. Contrasting her banal relationship with a poetic response to the natural world and the enchantments of motherhood, the story reminds us that traditional domestic fiction, in the hands of an intelligent, empathic writer, can render the ‘ordinary’ both psychologically complex and deeply affecting.

Kerry Greer is an Irish-Australian poet and writer. She received the Venie Holmgren Prize for Environmental Poetry in 2021. Kerry has been shortlisted for the Calibre Essay Prize, the Woollahra Digital Literary Award, the Newcastle Poetry Prize, the ACU Poetry Prize, the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, and more. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Cedar Crest College. Her début poetry collection, The Sea Chest, was published by Recent Work Press in 2023. Here is Kerry Greer with ‘First Snow’, published in the August issue of ABR.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, Robyn Arianrhod considers the state of popular science writing in the Australian literary landscape. She argues that in-depth science writing with popular appeal and literary value is increasingly hard to find in Australia. And where exemplary works of this kind are published, they are rarely recognised with reviews or literary prizes. Robyn Arianrhod is an Affiliate in Monash’s School of Mathematics and her new book is Vector: A surprising story of space, time, and mathematical transformation, published by NewSouth Books. Here is Robyn Arianrhod with ‘Beyond the mundane: Popular science writing in our literary landscape’.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, we feature an essay from the ABR archive: ‘Links in the Chain: Legacies of British slavery in Australia’ by Georgina Arnott. In this essay, Arnott considers how the field of Australian history will be reshaped by emerging links between British slavery in the Caribbean and early settlers to the Australian colonies. Georgina Arnott is ABR Assistant Editor and the author of several articles on the legacies of colonialism in Australia and two biographical works. Listen to Georgina Arnott’s ‘Links in the Chain: Legacies of British slavery in Australia’, published in the August 2020 issue of ABR.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, Timothy J. Lynch considers whether the United States is on the path to a second civil war, as forecast by Nick Bryant in The Forever War: America’s unending conflict with itself. In his book, Bryant, a former BBC Washington correspondent, argues that hate and paranoia form a central core of the American experience. Timothy J. Lynch is Professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne. Here is Timothy J. Lynch with ‘Death by suicide? Division as a default setting in America’, published in the July issue of ABR.

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On this week’s ABR Podcast, Nick Hordern tells the story of Mitty Lee-Brown, the Australian artist who went into self-imposed exile in 1968 to Ceylon, which in 1972 became Sri Lanka. Nick Hordern is a former diplomat and journalist, and the author of several books, including World War Noir: Sydney’s Unpatriotic War. Listen to ‘Mitty Lee-Brown: artist in exile: From a boarding house in Woollahra to Sri Lanka’, published in the July issue of ABR.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, Seumas Spark reviews Black Duck: A year at Yumburra by Bruce Pascoe with Lyn Harwood. Spark writes: ‘Black Duck is two things: a record of a year in the life of the farm, and a collection of musings on life and Country’. Seumas Spark is an historian at Monash University. Listen to Spark’s ‘Pascoe's vision: Musings on life and Country’, published in the June issue of ABR.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, we feature the third-place winner in this year’s Calibre Essay Prize, Nicole Hasham’s ‘Bloodstone: The day they blew up Mount Tom Price’. In preparation for the essay, Walkley Award-winning journalist Nicole Hasham travelled to the site of Wakathuni, the Pilbara mountain also known as Tom Price that was blown up in 1974 to mine iron ore. Listen to Nicole Hasham’s ‘Bloodstone: The day they blew up Mount Tom Price’, published in the July issue of ABR.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, Peter Rose reviews Hazzard and Harrower: The letters, edited by Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham. The correspondence between writers Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower ran from 1966 to 2008 and, in its unedited form, amounted to 400,000 words. Editors Susan Wyndham Brigitta Olubas have trimmed it down: ‘For the time being,’ says Peter Rose, ‘we must make do with this entertaining and not insubstantial entrée.’ Listen toPeter Rose’s ‘Flies in the Nirvana’: An illuminating and sisterly correspondence’, published in the June issue of ABR.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, Frank Moorhouse biographer Matthew Lamb tells of his subject’s battle to defend Australian authors and the founding of Copyright Agency in 1974. Listen to Matthew Lamb with ‘Copyright and its discontents: Frank Moorhouse’s battle to defend authors’, published in the June issue of ABR.

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Last month ABR announced the winner, runner-up and third-place recipient of the 2024 Calibre Essay Prize. In this week’s podcast we are delighted to present the 2024 Calibre runner-up, ‘Hold Your Nerve’, by Melbourne writer Natasha Sholl. Natasha Sholl is a writer and lapsed lawyer. Her work has appeared in publications including The Guardian, The Age, Good Weekend and Mamamia. Her debut book, Found, Wanting, was published by Ultimo Press in 2022. Listen to Natasha Sholl with ‘Hold Your Nerve’, published in the June issue of ABR.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, Tony Hughes d’Aeth reviews On Kim Scott: Writers on writers by Tony Birch. The book is the latest instalment in Black Inc.’s ‘Writers on Writers’ series. Tony Hughes-d’Aeth is Professor in English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia and the author of several books including the recently published Netflicks: Conceptual Television in the Streaming Era. Listen to Hughes-d’Aeth with ‘Archival poetics: An inflexion point in Indigenous writing’, published in the May issue of ABR.

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With the publication of the May issue, ABR was delighted to announce the winner of the 2024 Calibre Essay Prize. Tracey Slaughter – from Aotearoa New Zealand – has become the first overseas writer to claim the Calibre Prize with her essay ‘why your hair is long & your stories short’. We are thrilled Tracey Slaughter could join the ABR Podcast to read her winning essay. Listen to Tracey Slaughter with ‘why your hair is long & your stories short’, published in the May issue of ABR.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, Scott Stephens reviews a book by Anne Manne: Crimes of the Crimes of the Cross: The Anglican paedophile network of Newcastle, its protectors and the man who fought for justice. Why is narcissism a central theme for a book about child sexual abuse? Stephens writes: ‘without the capacity or willingness to be attentive to the humanity of another person’, unfathomable cruelty becomes possible. Scott Stephens is the ABC’s Religion & Ethics online editor and the co-host, with Waleed Aly, of The Minefield on ABC Radio National. Listen to Scott Stephens’s ‘Soul blindness: Clerical narcissism and unfathomable cruelty’, published in the May issue of ABR.

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This week on the ABR Podcast we review a profile of opposition leader Peter Dutton. Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s strongman politics by Lech Blaine is the ninety-third issue of the BlackInc Quarterly Essay. In his review of Bad Cop, political biographer Patrick Mullins begins by comparing Dutton to another cop-turned-politician in Bill Hayden. Listen to Patrick Mullins with ‘”Some grotesque Minotaur”: Peter Dutton’s aggressive formation’, published in the May issue of ABR.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, Michael Shmith reviews a memoir from poet, novelist, librettist, and Adelaide GP Peter Goldsworthy. The book’s title is The Cancer Finishing School. Shmith begins by observing that doctors aren’t supposed to become incurably ill, before immediately recognising this as the useless delusion of a patient. Michael Shmith is a Melbourne-based writer and editor whose most recent book is Merlyn, a biography of the widow of Sidney Myer. Listen to Michael Shmith’s ‘It might be …: P is for Peter, physician, patient, poet’, published in the April issue of ABR.

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In this week’s ABR podcast we feature one of the winners of the 2011 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Gregory Day’s ‘The Neighbour’s Beans’ was joint winner of the prize that year with Carrie Tiffany’s ‘Before He Left the Family’. Gregory Day commented at the time that ‘the short story form encourages an intense display of the writer’s craft whilst being a potent vehicle for the compression of emotion’. Gregory Day is a novelist, poet, and composer from the Eastern Otways region of southwest Victoria. Listen to Gregory Day’s ‘The Neighbour’s Beans’, published in the October 2011 issue of ABR.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, Frank Bongiorno assesses the Albanese government, which has recently completed the first half of its first term in office. Frank Bongiorno is Professor of History at the Australian National University, President of the Australian Historical Association, and the author of books including Dreamers and Schemers: A political history of Australia. Listen to Frank Bongiorno’s ‘‘‘Thin labourism” How is the Albanese government travelling?’, published in the April issue of ABR.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast Sascha Morrell reviews Matthew Lamb’s biography, Frank Moorhouse: Strange paths. Mathew Lamb might be the ideal reader for Moorhouse’s archive and seems to match Moorhouse’s capacity for telling the truth ‘bit by bit’, wink by nudge. Sascha Morrell is a regular ABR contributor and a Lecturer in Literary Studies at Monash University. Listen to Sascha Morrell’s ‘When I am famous’: A masterpiece of biographical synthesis’, published in the April issue of ABR.

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On this week’s ABR Podcast, we return to the winner of the 2016 Calibre Essay Prize, Michael Winkler’s ‘The Great Red Whale’. As ABR remarked at the time, ‘This excoriating yet remarkably subtle meditation is also a tribute to consolations: landscape, specifically the desert of Central Australia, and literature, notably Moby-Dick.’ Here is Michael Winkler with ‘The Great Red Whale’.

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This week on the ABR Podcast we consider a poetics of contemplation with Scott Stephens. In his review of Kevin Hart’s book on reading and thinking, Lands of Likeness, Stephens writes, ‘there is no desire to consume the object of contemplation; what there is, is a longing to understand’. Scott Stephens is the ABC’s Religion & Ethics online editor and the co-host, with Waleed Aly, of The Minefield on ABC Radio National. Listen to Scott Stephens’ ‘Nothing but kestrel: Kevin Hart’s invitation to read contemplatively’, published in the March issue of ABR.

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This week on the ABR Podcast we tell the story behind Indonesia’s twentieth-century literary masterpiece, the Buru Quartet, a set of novels that began life in a jail cell. The Buru novels were written by Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer, widely considered a potential winner of the Nobel Prize. Nathan Hollier, publisher at Australian National University Press, explains why the Buru novels hold special significance for Australia, even though, as he writes ‘few Australians have heard of them’. Here is Nathan Hollier with ‘”At least I’ve told these stories to you”: Pramoedya Ananta Toer and the Buru Quartet’, published in the March issue of ABR.

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In this week’s episode of the ABR Podcast we revisit Cate Kennedy’s short story ‘Sleepers’, which won second prize in the 2010 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. ‘Sleepers’ was also included in Kennedy’s 2012 short-story collection Like a House on Fire. Cate Kennedy is an award-winning writer of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Listen to Cate Kennedy’s ‘Sleepers’.

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This week on the ABR Podcast we look at Qantas with business writer and historian Stuart Kells. In his review of Alan Joyce and Qantas: The trials and transformation of an Australian icon by Peter Harbison, Kells notes that the company’s declining reputation extends beyond the area of substandard customer service. Stuart Kells is Adjunct Professor at La Trobe Business School and has twice won the Ashurst Business Literature Prize. Listen to ‘Fasten your seatbelts: Turbulent times at Alan Joyce’s Qantas’, published in the January-February issue of ABR.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, historian Ebony Nilsson tracks the lives of mid-century migrant Australians with the aid of ASIO and CIA files. Ebony Nilsson is a Research Fellow at the Australian Catholic University, the current ABR Laureate Fellow, and recently published her first book, Displaced Comrades: Politics and Surveillance in the Lives of Soviet Refugees in the West. Listen to ‘The lives of ‘ordinary’ people: From Siberia and Shanghai to Kings Cross’, published in the January-February issue of ABR.

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This week’s ABR Podcast features Kevin Foster’s straight-shooting review of whistleblower David McBride’s memoir The Nature of Honour, which begins: ‘Sometimes, for the faithful, it doesn’t do to look too closely into the life of your chosen idol.’ Foster’s books include Don’t Mention the War: The Australian Defence Force, the media and the Afghan conflict (2013). One of his current research projects – about social media and the military – is funded by the Australian Army Research Centre. ‘The lives of the saints: David McBride’s ethic of self-interest’ is published in the January-February issue of ABR.

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Welcome back to the ABR Podcast. We begin 2024 with the Peter Porter Poetry Prize. First presented in 2005, the Porter Prize is one of the world’s leading competitions for a new poem in English. It is worth a total of $10,000, of which the overall winner will receive $6,000. This episode of the ABR Podcast features the five shortlisted poets reading from their work, with introductions from ABR Editor Peter Rose. The winning poem will be announced at an online ceremony on 23 January 2024. To register for this event, visit our website.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, Joel Deane argues that one person more than any other is the reason why more than sixty per cent of voters said No in the Voice referendum. Former prime ministers, he says, haunt Australian politics like Hamlet’s Ghost. Joel Deane is a poet, novelist and speechwriter. Listen to Joel Deane’s ‘A maddening country: The long political shadow of John Howard’, published in the December issue of ABR.

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This week’s ABR Podcast is a reflection on the future of referendums in the aftermath of the Voice. Constitutional scholar Anne Twomey argues that referendums in Australia are now an endangered species and reminds us of the original intent behind them. Anne Twomeyis a Professor Emerita of the University of Sydney and was a member of the Constitutional Expert Group advising on the Voice referendum. Listen to Anne Twomey’s ‘Voiceless in Australia: Will we ever have another referendum?’, published in the December issue of ABR.

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This ABR Podcast features one of the eleven shortlisted entries in the 2023 Calibre Essay Prize, ‘The Morning Belongs to Us’, by Siobhan Kavanagh. The 2024 Calibre Essay Prize, worth a total of $10,000, is now open for entries and will be closed on the 22nd of January 2024. Full details can be found on the ABR website. Listen to Siobhan Kavanagh’s ‘The Morning Belongs to Us’, published in the November issue of ABR.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, Jelena Dinić pays tribute to Charles Simic, the Yugoslavian-born American poet, essayist, and translator, who died earlier this year. After her own poetry received an award in 2020, Jelena Dinić initiated a correspondence with Simic in Serbian, two writers ‘born in a country that doesn’t exist anymore’. Jelena Dinić’s writing in Serbian and English has been published in several literary journals and anthologies. Listen to ‘”Come closer and listen”: A tribute to Charles Simic (1938–2023)’, published in the November issue of ABR.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, Marilyn Lake reviews My Grandfather’s Clock: Four centuries of a British-Australian family by historian Graeme Davison. Lake argues that Davison has produced an ‘uncommonly good family history’, in part because of the broader history he tells. Marilyn Lake is an Honorary Professorial Fellow in History at the University of Melbourne. Listen to Marilyn Lake’s ‘The ancestors: An uncommonly good family history’, published in the November issue of ABR.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, Catriona Menzies-Pike reviews Richard Flanagan’s new hybrid work Question 7. Menzies-Pike argues that Flanagan’s ‘sweeping engagement with history ultimately brings the author back to himself’ in ways that limit understanding of the present tense. Catriona Menzies-Pike is a literary critic and former editor of the Sydney Review of Books. Listen to ‘The Measure of things: Flanagan’s looping book of questions’, published in the November issue of ABR.

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On this week’s ABR Podcast historian Zora Simic reviews Graeme Turner’s new book, The Shrinking Nation: How we got here and what can be done about it. Simic argues that state-of-the-nation books ‘can capture the Zeitgeist, but always run the risk of being outrun by history itself’. Zora Simic is a Senior Lecturer in History and Gender Studies at the University of New South Wales and a regular reviewer for ABR. Listen to Simic’s ‘Capturing the mood: A new addition to a tricky genre’, published in the October issue of ABR.

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On this week’s ABR Podcast, Julian V. McCarthy reviews Powering Up: Unleashing the clean energy supply chain by Alan Finkel. McCarthy endorses Finkel’s claim that conceptually and technically the solution is simple – ‘electrify everything’ – as well as his judgement that this transformation will require considerable social, economic, and political shifts. Julian V. Mcarthy is a senior adviser on clean energy transition. Listen to ‘Shipping sunshine: Accelerating clean energy transformation’, published in the September issue of ABR.

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This week, on the ABR podcast, we feature a special conversation between author and journalist David Marr, historian Mark McKenna and ABR’s Georgina Arnott, recorded in the middle of September 2023, one month out from the Voice referendum. The subject was David Marr’s new book, Killing for Country: A family story, which takes the reader to early nineteenth-century New South Wales and follows the bloodshed of invasion as it tracks north. Don't miss Mark McKenna’s review of Killing for Country, published in the October issue of ABR.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, we hear from Melissa Castan and Lynette Russell on the history and mechanics behind the Voice to parliament, the subject of next week's referendum. Melissa Castan is a Professor of Law at Monash University and the Director of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law. Lynette Russell is Sir John Monash Distinguished Professor and ARC Laureate at the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre. Listen to Lynette Russell with their co-authored article, ‘Ancient sovereignty shining through: A Voice to parliament, not a Voice in parliament’, published in the October Indigenous issue of ABR.

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This week on the ABR Podcast historian Penny Russell reviews Kate Grenville’s new book, a fictional account of her maternal grandmother. In Restless Dolly Maunder, Grenville reckons with the life of a woman who left no written records but whose memory she carries from her childhood. Penny Russell is Professor Emerita at The University of Sydney and an historian of families, intimacy, and social encounters. Listen to Penny Russell’s ‘Mirrors on misery: A brilliant portrait of an unhappy marriage’, published in the September issue of ABR.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, Professor Desmond Manderson takes us back sixty years to the 1963 Yirrkala Bark Petition drafted by Yolngu leader Yunupingu. The Yirrkala petition called for constitutional recognition of Indigenous rights and can be seen as an antecedent to the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Desmond Manderson is Director of the Centre for Law, Arts and Humanities at the Australian National University. Here he is with ‘Yunupingu’s song: Constitutions as acts of vision, not of division’, published in the September issue of ABR.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, Sarah Ogilvie explores the mystery behind the Oxford English Dictionary’s (1928) Australian lexicon. Ogilvie, a former Director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre, tells us about the Melbourne Dictionary People, a group of nineteenth and early-twentieth century Melburnians who contributed Australianisms for the OED project. Listen to Sarah Ogilvie’s ‘The Melbourne Dictionary People: Active service to the mother tongue’, published in the September issue of ABR.

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This week on the ABR Podcast, we have Joel Deane with The Great Australian Intemperance, his essay on rising economic and political insecurity as reflected in the My Place movement, conspiracy theories, neo-Nazis, and ‘sovereign citizen’ groups. Joel Deane is a poet, novelist, journalist, and speechwriter. Listen to Deane’s The Great Australian Intemperance, published in the September issue of ABR.

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This week on the ABR Podcast we celebrate twenty years of the Peter Porter Poetry Prize with readings from six winners. We invited these poets to reflect on the prize and their winning poems. Hear fresh readings from Judith Beveridge, A. Frances Johnson, Damen O’Brien, Sara M. Saleh, Alex Skovron and Judith Bishop. The 2024 Porter Prize, worth a total of $10,000, closes on October 9.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, writer and broadcaster Jonathan Green reviews Walter Marsh’s illuminating biography of the young Rupert Murdoch. Green explains that there is every reason ‘to get to the bottom of Rupert Murdoch’ given the media mogul’s far-reaching influence. Listen to Jonathan Green with ‘ONE MAN CONTROL: An enthralling study of the young Rupert Murdoch’, published in the August issue of ABR.

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This week on the ABR Podcast, we celebrate the 2023 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize shortlist over three episodes. In each episode, one of the three shortlisted authors will read their story. The overall winner of the Jolley Prize will be announced at an online ceremony on August 17. Proceeding in alphabetical order, Episode Three features ‘Our Own Fantastic’ by Uzma Aslam Khan, published in the August issue of ABR.

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This week on the ABR Podcast, we celebrate the 2023 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize shortlist over three episodes. In each episode, one of the three shortlisted authors will read their story. The overall winner of the Jolley Prize will be announced at an online ceremony on August 17. Proceeding in alphabetical order, Episode Two features ‘The Mannequin’ by Rowan Heath, published in the August issue of ABR.

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This week on the ABR Podcast, we celebrate the 2023 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize shortlist over three episodes. In each episode, one of the three shortlisted authors will read their story. The overall winner of the Jolley Prize will be announced at an online ceremony on August 17. Proceeding in alphabetical order, Episode One features Winter Bel’s ‘Black Wax’, published in the August issue of ABR.

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On this week’s ABR podcast, critic and essayist James Ley reflects on J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K, forty years after its publication. Coetzee’s fourth and Booker Prize-winning novel was his landmark work, explains Ley. This was despite it receiving criticism for supposedly eliding the political realities of Apartheid South Africa by being set in ‘the realm of allegory’. Listen to James Ley with ‘An obscure prodigy: J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K at forty’.

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On this week’s ABR Podcast, Kevin Foster reviews Crossing the Line, journalist Nick McKenzie’s account of the defamation trial, Ben Roberts-Smith versus Fairfax. Kevin Foster is Associate Professor at Monash University and the author of numerous articles and books on the Australian media’s treatment of Afghanistan. Listen to him read ‘Nick McKenzie’s bracing reportage’, published in the August issue of ABR.

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This week, on the ABR podcast, literary critic and editor Geordie Williamson reviews J.M. Coetzee’s new short story collection, The Pole and Other Stories. At the age of eighty-three Coetzee has again proved himself a ‘true and loving creator’, argues Williamson, by denying his characters endings or wholeness – ‘the great lie of art’. Listen to Geordie Williamson with ‘Last things: J.M. Coetzee’s antipodal forces’.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, we revisit the Australian Labor Party’s long and uneasy relationship with immigration. Dr Ebony Nilsson, a research fellow at the Australian Catholic University, argues that while the ALP no longer looks like a ‘happy white men’s club’, its policies on immigration reflect a longstanding ambivalence around race. Listen to Ebony Nilsson's ‘A happy white men’s club: The Australian Labor Party’s uneasy history with immigration’.

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This episode of the ABR Podcast looks at the history behind this year’s referendum on an Indigenous Voice to parliament and Indigenous constitutional recognition. Bain Attwood, Professor of History at Monash University, considers the 1967 referendum on Aboriginal rights, and how that ‘yes’ campaign differed from today’s. Listen to Bain Attwood with ‘A referendum in trouble: Race, rights, and history talk in 1967 and 2023’, published in the July issue of ABR.

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On this week’s ABR Podcast hear leading defamation scholar David Rolph discuss recent proceedings in the Federal Court relating to the reputation of Ben Roberts-Smith, a decorated soldier accused of war crimes in Afghanistan. David Rolph is a Professor of Law at Sydney University and the author of several books, including Reputation, Celebrity and Defamation Law and Defamation Law. Here is David Rolph with ‘Self-inflicted wounds: A vindication of investigative journalism’, which will appear in the July issue of ABR.

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This week on the ABR Podcast we revisit a shortlisted story from the 2016 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize: ‘Slut Trouble’ by Beejay Silcox. The provocatively titled story was republished in The Best Australian Stories 2017. Beejay is an ABR critic and the newly minted director of the Canberra Writers Festival. Listen to her read‘Slut Trouble’, commended in the 2016 Jolley Prize.

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This year marks seventy-five years of Indian independence from Britain. The anniversary coincides with India’s Presidency of the G20 summit, which will take place in New Delhi this September. This week on the ABR Podcast, we hear from John Zubrzycki, who argues that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is using the G20 platform to articulate a new foreign policy stance. John Zubrzycki has worked in India as a diplomat and foreign correspondent and is the author of The Shortest History of India. Listen to John Zubrzycki with ‘Politics by other means’.

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In this week’s ABR podcast we hear from the runner-up of the 2023 Calibre Essay Prize, Bridget Vincent. Calibre judges Yves Rees, Peter Rose and Beejay Silcox praised Bridget Vincent’s ‘Child Adjacent’ for its wryness and compassion. They noted that it broadened our understanding of the family and interrogated the terrors and moral dilemmas of raising children in the climate crisis. Bridget Vincent is a Lecturer in English at the Australian National University. Listen to her reading ‘Child Adjacent’, published in the June issue of ABR.

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In this week’s ABR podcast, David Rolph, Professor of Law at the University of Sydney, analyses the implications of the aborted Murdoch v Crikey defamation case concerning the January 6 attacks on the Capital building. Rolph argues that it was set to be an early test of the new public interest defence within federal defamation law but that Lachlan Murdoch likely dropped the action because of its implications for legal proceedings in the US involving his media company. Listen to David Rolph, the author of books including Reputation, Celebrity and Defamation Law, read ‘Who blinks first: Lachlan Murdoch v Crikey’, coming soon in the June issue of ABR.

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This week on the ABR Podcast we feature the 2023 Calibre Essay winner, ‘Flow States’, by Tracy Ellis. ‘Flow States’ begins with a single drop of water produced by a household tap left running. From here, Ellis crafts a tale on the obliterative power – real, existential, and metaphorical – of floodwater. Tracy Ellis, a Sydney-based editor, was the winner of the 2022 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize and thus becomes the first writer to win two separate ABR prizes. Listen to Tracy Ellis read ‘Flow States’.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, Gordon Pentland examines the theatrical impulses of contemporary British politics. He argues that these performative elements are an attempt to capture widespread nostalgia for the British past. Gordon Pentland is Professor of History at Monash University and a specialist on the political history of Britain since the late eighteenth century. ‘Parlour games: Britain and the anaesthesia of nostalgia’ is published in the May issue of ABR.

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This week, on the ABR Podcast, we look at a major exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia, ‘Andy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media’. Ten years in the making, ‘Andy Warhol and Photography’ demonstrates the multiple ways in which Warhol’s aesthetic anticipated the social-media world we live in today, perhaps even helping give rise to it. Patrick Flanery is a novelist and Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide.

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This week’s ABR Podcast is a commentary from writer and psychologist Debi Hamilton on the world’s growing addiction to background noise. With sound in increasing volumes filling ever more space – from taxis to restaurants, gyms to shops – what does it function to do, psychologically and socially? And what does quietness and even silence now represent within these spaces? Debi Hamilton was the joint winner of the Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2014. Her second poetry collection, The Sly Night Creatures of Desire, was published in 2016. Here is Debi Hamilton with ‘The Tyranny of Sound’, published in the April issue of ABR.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, Tony Hughes-d’Aeth reviews Alexis Wright’s new novel, Praiseworthy. Expectations are high: after all, Wright is the only author to have won both the Miles Franklin Award and the Stella Prize. Praiseworthy, Hughes-d’Aeth argues, is a book unlike any other. Grounded in an Indigenous cosmology, combining realism with absurdism, it takes aim at its ‘one true enemy’: assimilation. Listen to Tony Hughes-d’Aeth read ‘The Question of the Future: Alexis Wright’s Expansive New Work’, from the April issue of ABR.

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This week’s podcast features a review from ABR Editor Peter Rose of Darryl Pinckney’s absorbing new memoir, Come Back in September: A literary education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan. The book recounts Pinckney’s early years in New York and his unlikely friendship with Elizabeth Hardwick, the American literary critic, novelist and short-story writer. Peter Rose terms it a ‘distinctly New York kind of book’. Listen to the review, published in the April issue of ABR.

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In December last year, the Art Gallery of New South Wales launched its Sydney Modern project, the centerpiece of which was an extraordinary new building overlooking Sydney Harbour. Sydney Modern has received mixed reviews, some lamenting that it seems to have been designed as a chicbackdrop for Instagram selfies. In this week’s ABR podcast, Julie Ewington, an arts curator and broadcaster, describes her first encounter with Sydney Modern in a piece titled ‘Lyrical layers at AGNSW’, published in the April issue of ABR.

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In this week’s ABR podcast, James Curran considers the response of Asia-Pacific nations to the government’s decision to retain AUKUS, the major foreign affairs initiative of the Morrison government. In seeking to shape this response, Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s message is necessarily complex, argues Curran. James Curran is Professor of Modern History at Sydney University and foreign affairs columnist for the Australian Financial Review. Here he is reading ‘Exorcising the Ghosts: Australia’s new, old foreign policy’, which appears in the April issue of ABR.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, film critic Anne Rutherford reviews Laura Poitras’s documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,last year’s winner of the Golden Lion for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival. The film traces a campaign led by artist Nan Goldin to draw attention to America’s prescription painkiller epidemic via highly staged events, including a spectacular ‘die-in’ at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2019. Here is Anne Rutherford, Adjunct Associate Professor in Cinema Studies at Western Sydney University and the author of What Makes a Film Tick.

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Shirley Hazzard is widely regarded as one of Australia’s finest novelists, even though she published only four novels during her long lifetime. Now, Professor Brigitta Olubas from the University of New South Wales has written the first major literary biography of the writer in Shirley Hazzard: A writing life (Virago/Farrar, Straus and Giroux). In this week’s ABR podcast, ABR Editor Peter Rose interviews Professor Olubas about her study of the ‘complex, alluring, peripatetic artist’. Listen to the interview here.

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This week the ABR Podcast considers Revive, Labor’s new National Cultural Policy. In a commentary for the March issue of ABR, Jennifer Mills, novelist and director of the Australian Society of Authors, separates the theatre from the substance at the launch of Revive. Mills asks how, precisely, Writers Australia will function, and whom it will benefit. Listen to Jennifer Mills reading ‘A revival meeting at the Espy: Labor’s new National Cultural Policy’.

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The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, one of the world’s leading prizes for short fiction, is now open and closes on April 24, with total prize money of $12,500. In this week’s ABR Podcast, we feature Maria Takolander’s story ‘A Roānkin Philosophy of Poetry’, which won ABR’s short story competition in 2010, the year before it was renamed the Jolley Prize. It is one of the best-read features on ABR’s website, which hosts content going back to 1978. ‘A Roānkin Philosophy of Poetry’ is an artful take on academic intrigue and absurdism. Maria Takolander’s story appeared in the December 2010–January 2011 issue of ABR. Listen to Maria Takolander reading her story thirteen years later.

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Whereas many look to Vienna for its imperial architecture, the city developed a rich and complex relationship with modernist forms when they exploded across Europe in the early twentieth century. In this week’s ABR Podcast, Christopher Menz, former Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, explains this fascinating aspect of Viennese cultural history – including its surprising connection with Australia. Christopher Menz and ABR Editor Peter Rose will be leading a cultural tour of Vienna from October 13 to 24 for Academy Travel. Listen to Christopher Menz in conversation with Academy Travel’s Stuart Barrie here.

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This week we feature the 2013 winner of the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, one of the world's leading prizes for a short story written in English. Michelle Michau-Crawford’s ‘Leaving Elvis’ is a story about regret and unlikely heroes, which has ‘echoes of the distinctive elements of Elizabeth Jolley’s own fiction’, according to the 2013 Jolley Prize judges. The 2023 Jolley Prize is currently open for entries. Listen to Michelle Michau-Crawford, a Western Australian writer of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, read 'Leaving Elvis'.

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This week’s ABR Podcast is a special feature on the work and life of one of Australia’s finest poets, Peter Porter (1929-2010). Morag Fraser, currently at work on a biography of Porter, introduces the podcast, setting out the major currents of his life. From there, fifteen poets and critics read from the Porter oeuvre, in all its ‘variety and depth’, explains Fraser, and offer their own memories of the man. Listen to Gig Ryan, Sarah Holland-Batt, Martin Flanagan, John Kinsella, Judith Beveridge and more read from Porter’s making with words.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, Timothy J. Lynch, Professor of American Politics at the University of Melbourne, considers the November 2022 American midterm elections. Lynch finds reason to ‘to be cheerful’, for what voters communicated – more than anything else – was their growing intolerance for a new brand of ideologically driven, conspiratorial politics. Here is Timothy J. Lynch with ‘Enough already! Post-Trump America returns to the centre’.

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Since the May 2022 federal election, several books have been published seeking to explain the rise of the teal independents. In this week’s ABR Podcast, Dennis Altman, a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at La Trobe University, reads his review of three such books. Altman argues that the media’s concern with the teals borders on an ‘obsession’, blinding them to other cross-currents in the Australian political landscape. Listen to Dennis Altman’s ‘Teal Talk: Exaggerating the independents’ revolution’.

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In this week’s Podcast we’re delighted to present the five poems shortlisted in the 2023 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. This happily alliterative prize was created in 2005 and renamed in 2011, the year after the great poet’s death. Peter Rose introduces our far-flung quintet, who then introduce and read their poems. Further details and illuminating comments on the individual poems by the judges can be found here. We hope you enjoy these wonderful poems. It’s a great way to get to know them before the prize ceremony on Thursday, 19 January.

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What has spurred thousands of ordinary women in Iran and throughout the world to take to the streets under the slogan ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’? How unprecedented is this recent uprising in the history of Iran’s women’s movement? In this week’s ABR podcast, author-journalist Zoe Holman discusses the distinctive features of this protest and argues that its primary drivers are members of Iran’s Generation Z, who are educated, fearless, and angry.

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This week we draw on ABR’s expanding digital archive and head back to December 2010, when ABR Editor Peter Rose wrote at length about E.M. Forster, author of novels such as Howards End and Room with a View. In this podcast, Rose discusses Wendy Moffat’s biography of Forster, before roaming more widely to revisit those influential novels and dipping into the immense Forster literature – and the even more gargantuan literature of Bloomsbury, of which Forster was a peripheral and somewhat wary member.

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This week’s episode of the ABR podcast is devoted to the Books of the Year. With ABR Editor Peter Rose, critic and writer Beejay Silcox and historian Frank Bongiorno discuss the books that stirred them most in 2022. This follows a Books of the Year feature in the December issue of ABR, with contributions from thirty-six writers and critics. Listen to Peter Rose, Beejay Silcox and Frank Bongiorno discuss the best books of 2022.

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Unlike in the United States and several other Western nations, Australian governments are under no compulsion to consult parliament before sending troops to war. In Subimperial Power: Australian in the international arena, Clinton Fernandes argues that this reflects, and furthers, Australia’s longstanding ambition in foreign affairs, which is to demonstrate its usefulness to the United States. In this week’s ABR Podcast, Kevin Foster, an academic at Monash University who has published widely on war in the Australian media, reviews Subimperial Power.

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Lachlan Murdoch will almost certainly be the next head of News Corp, one of the world’s largest media companies and the dominant force in Australia’s media landscape. In this week’s ABR Podcast, Patrick Mullins, visiting fellow at the ANU’s National Centre of Biography, reviews a new biography of Lachlan Murdoch by Paddy Manning, titled The Successor: The high-stakes life of Lachlan Murdoch. Listen to Mullins read ‘Dual Focus’, which appears in the December issue of ABR.

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In this week’s ABR podcast, Amanda Laugesen asks what the word ‘bogan’ says about Australian culture and society. Laugesen, who is Chief Editor of The Australian National Dictionary, explains the history of the word and its derivatives, including boganity. Listen to Amanda Laugesen’s reading ‘On Boganism’, which appears in the November 2022 issue of ABR.

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This week’s ABR Podcast features Anne Rutherford’s review of the new SBS miniseries The Australian Wars, published in the November issue of ABR. Directed by Arrernte and Kalkadoon woman Rachel Perkins, the series is an attempt to recast Australian frontier conflict by posing new questions. Echoing Perkins, Rutherford asks: ‘Why is the extreme violence of the frontier not recognised as war?’ and ‘Why is the death of an estimated 100,000 people on the frontier, both black and white, not acknowledged and memorialised?’ Listen to the ABR Podcast here.

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In this week’s ABR podcast, listen to Ronan McDonald discuss one hundred years of James Joyce’s Ulysses, among the most famous books of the twentieth century. McDonald, who is the Gerry Higgins Chair in Irish Studies at Melbourne University, explains that Ulysses is a work with a complex publishing history, even setting aside its censorship record. To mark the Ulysses centenary, Cambridge University Press has republished a splendid facsimile of the original version of Ulysses, raising new questions about the book we thought we knew.

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Italy is used to political volatility. In today’s ABR Podcast, we learn about the new test facing Italy’s fragile political system following the cessation of the relatively stable leadership of Mario Draghi. Claudio Bozzi, a barrister and Lecturer in Law at Deakin University, describes the chaotic seaside campaign that took place in the lead up to the September general election. He concludes with a postscript on Italian politics written in the days after his commentary went to print. Listen to Claudio Bozzi reading 'Under the beach umbrellas', from the October 2022 issue of ABR.

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In our October issue ABR Editor and award-winning memoirist Peter Rose reviews Childhood, a remarkable new memoir by Adelaide critic and writer Shannon Burns in which Burns relates the story of a childhood and adolescence spent in great poverty and neglect. In this week’s episode of the ABR Podcast, listen to Peter Rose and Shannon Burns in conversation.

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As the November election date approaches for Victoria, Daniel Andrews is currently Australia’s longest-serving incumbent state premier. Journalist and author Gideon Haigh examines a new biography of Andrews by The Age’s state political reporter Sumeyya Ilanbey, noting her astute observations of Andrews and his ‘modus oper-Andrews’. In this week’s episode of The ABR Podcast, Gideon Haigh reads his review from the October issue.

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In this year’s ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story prize, we received more than 1,300 entries from thirty-six different countries, a testament to ongoing international interest in the Jolley Prize and ABR. Writers explored themes and topics including the pandemic, climate change, grief, desire, parenthood, and community. In this week’s podcast, the three finalists read their shortlisted stories: ‘Dog Park’ by Nina Cullen, ‘Natural Wonder’ by Tracy Ellis, and ‘Whale Fall’ by C.J. Garrow. They are briefly introduced by Jolley Prize judge and ABR Deputy Editor, Amy Baillieu. A more detailed judges’ report on the three shortlisted stories is available on our website, along with the details of the fourteen longlisted stories.

The stories also appear in our August issue, now on sale. We will announce the overall winner of the Jolley Prize at a special online event this Thursday, 11 August at 6pm Melbourne time. All are welcome to this free event, but please register with rsvp@australianbookreview.com.au. We look forward to seeing you there!

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The runner-up in this year’s Calibre Essay Prize, Sarah Gory’s essay ‘Ghosts, Ghosts Everywhere’ confronts spectres of the past in order to pose questions about how to live ethically in the present and about what responsibilities we bear towards the future. Drawing on a wide range of writers and thinkers as well as her grandfather’s experience of the Holocaust, Gory plots the process by which one generation’s traumatic suffering becomes another’s imaginative investment. As Gory observes, rituals of memorialisation, public and private, are beset on all sides by the snares of forgetfulness, by the temptation to ‘relegat[e] to the past what is ongoing’. Shifting between recollection and rumination, the essay refuses to yield to this temptation, proceeding through a series of fragments, ghostly demarcations of historical patterns that continue to repeat.

Sarah Gory is a writer and editor based in Naarm/Melbourne.

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Based on Antonio Garcia Gutierrez’s El Trovador, a romantic melodrama set against the backdrop of a fifteenth-century Spanish civil war, Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore has been described as the ‘apotheosis of the bel canto opera, with its demands for vocal beauty, agility and range’. Yet in what is also his darkest and most death-haunted work, Verdi invests the brightness and vocal embellishments of bel canto with greater dramatic tension in realising such characters as Azucena, the gypsy woman who must endlessly relive her mother’s tragedy, and her supposed son, the ardent, loyal, ever mystified Manrico. In this episode of The ABR podcast, Editor Peter Rose reads his review of Opera Australia’s new production of Il Trovatore. Rose worries that with Davide Livermore’s relentless and garish direction a newcomer might be led to dismiss Verdi’s great opera – and opera as an art form indeed – as crass and irreverent.

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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February this year was met with near universal condemnation by Western nations. While aggression of this kind and on this scale has been relatively anomalous this side of World War II, Russia’s disregard for the laws and institutions upholding global peace and security is far from unprecedented. In this week’s episode of The ABR Podcast, Ben Saul reads his commentary piece from the July issue, arguing that Western disrespect for international law – from NATO’s intervention in Kosovo to the US-led invasion of Iraq to Australia’s detention of asylum seekers – is entirely consistent with Russia’s violation of ‘a stable, mutually agreed world order’. If, as Saul warns, ‘we expect Russia and China to be law-abiding, we must also look in the mirror’.

Ben Saul is Challis Chair of International Law at the University of Sydney, an Associate Fellow of Chatham House in London, and has taught law at Harvard and Oxford.

This is one of a series of politics columns generously supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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A year before he ascended to the prime ministership of India in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru proclaimed that his nation was ‘a cultural unity amidst diversity, a bundle of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads’. Yet, in the seventy-five years since India’s independence, secularist tolerance of religious and cultural difference has been eroded by a rising tide of Hindu majoritarianism. In this week’s episode of The ABR Podcast, John Zubrzycki reads his commentary on India’s transformation under Narendra Modi’s leadership – a tenure that has seen an increasingly unbridled attempt to establish Hindu hegemony across a variety of domains, from citizenship laws to education to beef consumption.

John Zubrzycki is an historian and former diplomat and foreign correspondent. He is the author of The Shortest History of India (2022).

This commentary is generously supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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Of the many pernicious legacies of colonialism, Australia’s servility in the face of Britain’s nuclear arms aspirations is one of the most under-reported and most consequential. In this week’s episode of The ABR Podcast, Elizabeth Tynan reads her essay tracing the clandestine history of, and fallout from, the agreements that allowed the British to test atomic weapons at various sites in South and Western Australia after World War II. By highlighting the Menzies government’s eager consent and the Australian media’s compliance, Tynan shows that far from being a passive victim, Australia was largely complicit in tests that wrought havoc on large tracts of land and on the Indigenous communities who lived there.

Elizabeth Tynan is an associate professor in the Graduate Research School at James Cook University, and the author of Atomic Thunder: The Maralinga story (2016) and The Secret of Emu Field: Britain’s forgotten atomic tests in Australia (2022).

This commentary is generously supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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Ann-Marie Priest’s My Tongue Is My Own, published by La Trobe University Press and reviewed in our June issue, is the first authorised biography of the Australian poet Gwen Harwood (1920–1995). Unsurprisingly, this was not the first attempt to record the life of one of Australia’s most loved and admired poets. In an exclusive feature for ABR, John Harwood reflects on the conflicting motives behind his literary executorship of his mother’s estate – an estate holding the secrets to an at-times fractious marriage between two opposing temperaments.

It's a candid, fascinating addition to the vast literature surrounding Ian Hamilton’s Keepers of the Flame (1992) and the knotty ethics of literary biography.

John Harwood has written poetry, fiction, biography, environmental journalism, literary criticism, and satire. His novels The Ghost Writer (2004), The Séance (2008), and The Asylum (2012) have been translated into several languages and won several awards. 

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The leaked draft judgment in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito proposed overturning the precedent set by Roe v. Wade, has returned abortion rights to the headlines. In this week’s episode of The ABR Podcast, Linda Atkins reads her essay, ‘Shouting Abortion’, which sets women’s right to terminations within the broader context of intergenerational poverty and the class lines of the medical profession. As personal as it is political, Atkins’ piece offers an unvarnished account of abortion from both sides of the operating table.

Linda Atkins is an obstetrician, married with three children. ‘Shouting Abortion’ was shortlisted in this year’s Calibre Essay Prize.

This commentary is generously supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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Conceived during a holiday in the spa-town of Marienbad, Lohengrin stands at the crossroads of Richard Wagner’s operatic oeuvre: it was the last work composed before his political exile (as a result of his participation in the Dresden Uprising) while offering a glimpse of the leitmotivic technique that would become the signature of his late style. In this week’s episode of The ABR Podcast, Peter Rose reads his review of the recent production of Lohengrin that ran at the Arts Centre Melbourne from 14–24 May. A collaboration between Opera Australia and La Monnaie in Brussels, this Lohengrin was directed by Olivier Py and featured an all-star cast, including the internationally renowned Jonas Kaufmann, Emily Magee, and Warwick Fyfe. ‘At his best,’ Rose observes, ‘Wagner stirs us, slays us, seduces us as no other composer can – a unique entrancement.’

Peter Rose is Editor of ABR.

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The Writers on Writers series aims to tease some of Australia’s literary treasures out of the Aladdin’s cave of canonicity. A collaboration between publisher Black Inc., the University of Melbourne, and the State Library of Victoria, it began in 2017 with Alice Pung’s book on John Marsden and Erik Jensen’s on Kate Jennings. The series now boasts eleven titles, the most recent of which is Sean O’Beirne’s book on Helen Garner. In this week’s episode of The ABR Podcast, Beejay Silcox points out the difficulty of pairing any writer with Garner, who ‘deserves a well-armed opponent, not an acolyte’. For Silcox, this latest instalment encapsulates the idiosyncrasies of the entire series of ‘not quite memoirs and not quite primers’ – idiosyncrasies that have perhaps ‘set [O’Beirne] up to fail’.

Beejay Silcox is an Australian writer and critic, and the recipient of ABR’s Fortieth Birthday Fellowship.

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When Scott Morrison called the federal election in early April, he did so on an apologetic note: ‘I get it that people are tired of politics.’ This was a predictable gesture from the prime minister: his term has been marked by a series of controversies that have raised many questions about his capacity to lead on some of the country’s most pressing issues, though relatively few about his skill in internal party politics.

In this week’s episode of The ABR Podcast, Frank Bongiorno looks at the crisis of political leadership in Australia crystallised by Morrison’s government. To see the crisis clearly, Bongiorno highlights the way our contemporary political landscape has been shaped by the concentration of power in the hands of a professional class of party functionaries. As a result, the paths into politics through the major parties have narrowed and are now gatekept by factional operatives, casting doubt on the representativeness of our choice of representatives.

Frank Bongiorno is Professor of History at the Australian National University. His Dreamers and Schemers: A political history of Australia will be published by La Trobe University Press in November 2022.

This commentary is generously supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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Shortly before Simon Tedeschi’s grandmother, Lucy Gershwin, died sixteen years ago, she recorded a memoir of her wartime years. Gershwin, a Polish Jew, was the only survivor of a family obliterated by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Tedeschi’s powerful essay, ‘This woman my grandmother’, reflects on the moment he decided to read her memoirs and encounter the tragic outlines of a life that remains shaded by a reticence typical of her generation. It’s a thoroughly deserving winner of the Calibre Essay Prize, now in its sixteenth year and one of the world’s leading prizes for an original essay. The judges – critics Beejay Silcox and Declan Fry and Peter Rose, Editor of ABR – chose ‘This woman my grandmother’ from a field of almost 600 entries from 17 different countries. We publish ‘This woman my grandmother’ in our May issue. In this week’s podcast, Simon Tedeschi reads his winning essay.

Simon Tedeschi is one of Australia’s most renowned classical pianists. He commenced piano studies when he was six and gave his first concerto performance at the age of eight, at the Sydney Opera House. He has performed with all the major Australian state orchestras, as well as many overseas, and he has released a number of recordings through Sony and ABC Classics. His first book, Fugitive, is now available from Upswell.

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The Gough Whitlam and Malcom Fraser Chair of Australian Studies was established at Harvard University in 1976 as a diplomatic gift marking the bicentenary of the American Revolution. It was also part of a global strategic initiative that saw Australian Studies visiting professorships spring up in places from Dublin and Copenhagen to Tokyo and Beijing. While not all such professorships have fared equally well, the Harvard Chair of Australian Studies has been bolstered by the financial largesse of its host institution as well as by its record of strong recruitment. In this episode of The ABR Podcast, Joan Beaumont reflects on the history of this unique institutional arrangement and what it might help us see about both the place of Australian studies in a global context and the future of collaborative research.

Joan Beaumont is Professor Emerita in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at ANU and author of Australia’s Great Depression.

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When Jeff Bezos launched Amazon in 1994, few imagined that eighteen years later the company’s skyrocketing profits would actually launch him into space. What started out as a virtual bookstore run out of Bezos’ garage would turn into an e-commerce giant, forever changing the culture and economics of bookselling.

In this episode of The ABR Podcast, James Ley reads his essay-review of Mark McGurl’s new study, Everything and Less: The novel in the age of Amazon. Where McGurl sees Amazon as refreshingly iconoclastic, Ley is more sceptical. For Ley, Amazon’s governing principle of customer satisfaction is precisely what gets in the way of its ability to deliver not just any kind of good, but one which should return us to a more imaginative and less acquisitive version of ourselves.

James Ley is Deputy Editor of Books and Ideas at The Conversation and has been a regular contributor to ABR since 2003.

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In an age of disinformation, whistleblowers such as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden have been accorded the status of folk heroes. And yet, as their respective cases show, no other act of public service is harried as ruthlessly and vindictively by governments whose secrets have been aired.

In this episode of The ABR Podcast, listen to Kieran Pender read his cover feature for the April issue, in which he argues for stronger whistleblower protections by examining the case of Bernard Collaery. A notable Canberra lawyer, Collaery has been charged with breaching the Intelligence Services Act 2001 for allegedly passing on information that implicated the Australian government in spying on Timor-Leste for commercial gain. Since 2018, a tortuous pre-trial battle has been fought over the attorney-general’s right to enshroud the case in secrecy. As Pender shows, the Collaery case cuts to the very heart of Australian democracy.

Kieran Pender, a regular contributor to ABR, is an Australian writer and senior lawyer at the Human Rights Law Centre.

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Few phrases captured the atmosphere of lethargy and disorientation in which many of us lived under lockdown as much as ‘brain fog’. The term has come to denote a whole range of symptoms – from fatigue and forgetfulness to anxiety and an inability to focus – that serve as an historical marker for our Covid moment. Yet, as literary scholar Thomas H. Ford observes, the malaise is far from unique to the twenty-first century. In this episode of The ABR Podcast, listen to Ford as he traces the history of cognitive fuzziness, revealing the persistent concerns about mental overwork for which ‘brain fog’ is only the latest diagnosis.

Thomas H. Ford is Senior Lecturer in English at La Trobe University and the author of Wordsworth and the Poetics of Air (2018) and How to Read a Poem: Seven steps (2021).

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In this special episode of The ABR Podcast, Peter Rose reads the second and concluding instalment of his 2021 diary, taking us from July to December. These entries continue his chronicle of life under rolling lockdowns – not only for himself, but also for his mother, Elsie, who had moved into aged care earlier that year because of her declining health. Against the arrhythmic schedule of closures and prohibitions, faint tracings of the pre-pandemical world appear: birthday celebrations, an English batting collapse, email trouble, a high five. Written under a cloud of personal and collective uncertainty, these diaries record a son’s observance of his mother’s last days. Elsie Rose died at the age of ninety-five on 15 March 2022.

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Author and scholar Kevin Birmingham has shown that books as much as people are worthy subjects of biography. This year he has followed up The Most Dangerous Book, his award-winning account of the battle to get James Joyce’s Ulysses published, with The Sinner and the Saint, a book about the genesis of another classic: Crime and Punishment. In this week’s episode of the ABR podcast, Geordie Williamson reads his review of Birmingham’s latest study, one which ‘brings microscopic detail and a sense of drama to the composition’ of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s masterpiece.

Geordie Williamson has been chief literary critic of The Australian since 2008.

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Race, gender, class, sexuality – categories of identity have become central to not only our understanding of politics, but also our appreciation of art. Has the prominence of these categories, however, begun to circumscribe the achievements of writers celebrated on the basis of their identity? In this episode of the ABR podcast, Mindy Gill reads her cover feature from the March issue. By parsing the rhetoric with which non-white writers are evaluated by reviewers, Gill shrewdly observes that in equating marginalisation with authenticity we do writers no favours. For in having their cultural background valued above all else, writers are being tacitly encouraged to eschew refinements of style and technique for a verisimilitude that often borders on caricature.

Mindy Gill is a Brisbane-based poet and critic, and ABR’s fifth Rising Star.

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For his sins, Peter Rose has always kept a diary. Over the years, ABR has occasionally published extracts, which have tended to consist of annual highlights laced with gossip and humour. The 2021 instalment is rather different in tone. The lockdowns occasioned by the pandemic also coincided with a marked deterioration in the health of his mother, who moved into aged care in March last year.

In this episode of the ABR podcast, Rose reads diary extracts from January until June (July to December will follow in a subsequent episode), documenting the anguish and impotence that go with being a carer under lockdown – as well as the volatile unconscious life of these feelings. Mordant and moving in equal measure, this selection offers a glimpse into both the waking life of an editor and his dreaming one.

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Best known for films such as Robocop (1987), Basic Instinct (1992), and Showgirls (1995), the Dutch director Paul Verhoeven has made his name as a provocateur whose lurid social satires are infused with campy violence and heady eroticism. Having tackled the American military-industrial complex and the Las Vegas sex industry, Verhoeven now takes on an even bigger institution: the Catholic Church. His new film, Benedetta, charts the fallout from the liaison between two young nuns in a seventeenth-century Italian convent. In this week’s podcast, listen to Miles Pattenden read his review of the film for ABR Arts. As Pattenden notes, ‘those who buy their tickets for the soupçons of Sapphic frottage are unlikely to be disappointed’.

Miles Pattenden is Senior Research Fellow in medieval and early modern studies at Australian Catholic University in Melbourne.

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American poet Tracy K. Smith was the twenty-second Poet Laureate of the United States, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her 2011 volume Life on Mars. Such Color is a collection of her best poems from her wide-ranging career, before culminating in a selection of newly published poems. In Felicity Plunkett’s review, she considers the breadth of Smith’s oeuvre and the undercurrent of water throughout, writing: ‘Smith’s image of creative marine energy recalls Sylvia Plath’s image of words’ “indefatigable hooftaps”, echoing as they carry meaning outwards. In Plath’s case, as in Smith’s, one direction is seawards.’

Felicity Plunkett is a poet, critic, and a previous ABR Patrons’ Fellow. Felicity was Poetry Editor for University of Queensland Press and edited Thirty Australian Poets (UQP, 2011). She has a PhD from the University of Sydney and her reviews and essays have been widely published.

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In 2002, Nadia Wassef founded – with her sister, Hind, and their friend, Nihal – the Cairo-based independent bookstore Diwan. Wassef’s memoir, Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller, is a record of the setbacks and success of the store’s creation, while also an insight into a nation simmering with revolutionary politics. In today's episode, ABR critic Beejay Silcox, who spent several years living in Egypt, describes in a personal review how she stumbled upon Diwan on her first night in Cairo: ‘a pocket of alphabetised calm in the city’s ever-roiling chaos’.

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‘I would like to write about dominance, revulsion, separation, the horrible struggles between people who love each other,’ wrote Helen Garner, foreshadowing How to End a Story, the final instalment of her published diaries, following Yellow Notebook (2019) and One Day I’ll Remember This (2020). While the first two volumes spanned eight years apiece, How to End a Story spans only three. Starting in 1995, shortly after the release of Garner’s The First Stone, it details the dissolution of her marriage to another writer, V. As Lisa Gorton notes, this volume differs from its precursors both in tone and focus: ‘This one is as compelling as a detective story. This one is edited with the sense of an ending.’

Lisa Gorton is an award-winning poet, novelist, and critic, and a former Poetry Editor of ABR. Her most recent book is a collection of poems, Empirical (Giramondo, 2019).

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Melbourne’s Moreland City Council recently agreed to adopt a new name, after petitioning by Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung community leaders and prominent local non-Indigenous representatives. The petitioners argued that the name ‘Moreland’, adopted in 1839 by Scottish settler Farquhar McCrae, derived from a Jamaican slave plantation. Renaming the council was an opportunity to bring about greater awareness of both the global legacies of enslavement and the history of Indigenous dispossession. In this week’s episode, Samuel Watts reflects on the politics of memorialisation and its impact on public conceptions of history.

Samuel Watts is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on the experiences of African Americans in the Deep South during Reconstruction. His piece on the storming of the US Capitol was featured on ABR Podcast no.49.

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In today’s episode, listen to the shortlisted poets for the 2022 Peter Porter Poetry Prize – Chris Arnold, Dan Disney, Michael Farrell, Anthony Lawrence, and Debbie Lim – read their poems. This year, our judges Sarah Holland-Batt, Jaya Savige, and Anders Villani had 1,330 poems to assess. In their comments, they write: ‘The five accomplished shortlisted poems each share a narrative bent, a focus on form (four out of five are stanzaic), and a capacity to startle and surprise with vivid imagery, linguistic torque, humour, and juxtaposition.’

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For nearly forty years, Joel and Ethan Coen – à la the Coen brothers – have been inseparable, operating as a directorial dyad since their 1984 début Blood Simple. But the recent release of The Tragedy of Macbeth, directed solely by Ethan Coen, marks the first solo venture by one of the brothers. In today’s episode, Tim Byrne reads his essay 'Coen it alone', a deep dive into the Coen brothers’ universe. As he writes, 'It seems a good time to drill down into the brothers’ quintessence: what is a Coen brothers’ film, and what could or should we expect from a Coen brother film? Is the zygote finally subdividing?'

Tim Byrne is a freelance writer and theatre critic for Australian Book Review and Time Out Melbourne. He is currently working on a novel.

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As momentum builds for constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, it is timely to reflect on the career of William Cooper. A Yorta Yorta elder and founding secretary of the Australian Aborigines’ League, Cooper gathered support for Indigenous representation in parliament and for voting and land rights during the interwar years. Historian Bain Attwood’s new book tells Cooper’s story but resists the biographical impulse that would separate the man from his social milieux. In today’s episode, Professor Emerita Penny Russell reads her review of Attwood’s portrait of this remarkable man, whose eloquence has left only a scant textual record. What survives reveals a figure ‘always driven by a profound vision of justice and moral uplift’.

Penny Russell is a historian of families, intimacy, and social encounters in nineteenth-century Australia, with a longstanding interest in the intricacies of gender, class, race, and culture in colonial societies. Penny is a Professor Emerita at The University of Sydney.

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The late Gillian Mear’s two governing passions were horse-riding and writing – passions that came together in the fiction for which she is best-known, such as Ride a Cock Horse (1988) and Foal’s Bread (2011). Mears’s life – from her childhood in rural New South Wales to her recourse to alternative therapies for her diagnosis of multiple sclerosis – has now been pieced together by Bernadette Brennan in Leaping into Waterfalls: The enigmatic Gillian Mears. In today’s episode, Brenda Walker reads her review of Brennan’s biography, which she describes as ‘a mighty and populous canvas’, charting the course of ‘a writer who took note of everything: parents, siblings, friends, lovers’.

Brenda Walker has written essays, short fiction, four novels, and a memoir, Reading by Moonlight. Her books have won numerous Australian awards, including the Victorian Premier’s Award for Nonfiction.

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The French philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour is one of the world’s most iconoclastic thinkers, and has recently turned his attention to the relations between human activity and the natural world. In his new work After Lockdown: A metamorphosis, Latour takes pandemical lockdowns as a provocation for a ‘philosophical fable’, in which the return to normalcy allows for a transformative re-encounter with the Earth as a work millennia in the making. In today’s episode, listen to Paul Muldoon read his review of this genre-crossing work, a work of which even the ‘Brothers Grimm would be in awe’.

Paul Muldoon is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Monash University.

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Each year, the judges of the Calibre Essay Prize face the difficult task of selecting a winner from an impressive shortlist. Last year’s winner was Theodore Ell for ‘Facades of Lebanon’, an intimate chronicle of the 2020 port explosion in Beirut. In today’s episode, ABR turns to another impressive essay, ‘Dugongesque’, which was shortlisted for last year’s Calibre Essay Prize and appears in our upcoming December issue. Written by the award-winning Queensland author Krissy Kneen, ‘Dugongesque’ is a poignant exploration of identity, bodies, and death as Kneen embarks on a diving course bought for her by her partner. Listen to Kneen read her essay in full.

And for those interested, the 2022 Calibre Essay Prize, worth $7,500, is currently open for submission.

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The Australian modernist photographer Max Dupain is commonly known for his sweltering photograph Sunbaker, which offered the nation one of its most iconic beach images. In today’s episode, Helen Ennis reads her essay ‘Max Dupain’s dilemmas’, which was commended in the 2021 Calibre Essay Prize. It explores the breadth of Dupain’s work beyond Sunbaker, as well as his own grapplings with self-doubt and his complicated perspectives on life and travel.

Helen Ennis is Emeritus Professor at the ANU Centre for Art History and Art Theory and a past ABR Fellow. She is an independent photography curator and writer specialising in the area of Australian photographic practice. She is currently writing a biography of Max Dupain.

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Edward Said, most regarded for his pioneering study Orientalism (1978), led a varied life that combined rigorous scholarship with fearless activism. Born in Jerusalem and brought up in Cairo, Said left for America at the age of sixteen and thereafter steadily ascended through the ranks of the American academy. Outside of the ivory tower, Said became a powerful spokesperson for Palestinian self-determination. Timothy Brennan’s new biography, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said, traces Said’s decades of engagement with the key political, cultural, and literary concerns of his time. As James Jiang notes in his review, ‘what emerges most distinctly from Brennan’s portrait are not the lineaments of a gifted “mind”, but rather the sheer messiness of thinking for a living’.

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‍In May 2020, the High Court reaffirmed the Federal Court’s 2017 ruling that the Yindjibarndi people of the Pilbara region in Western Australia held exclusive native title to land on which the Fortescue Metals Group (FMG) had opened its Solomon Hub iron ore mine. The court thus brought to a close FMG’s thirteen-year campaign to secure unfettered land access. In today’s episode of the ABR Podcast, Perth-based writer and anthropologist Stephen Bennetts reviews Paul Cleary’s Title Fight, which offers a meticulous account of the Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation’s victory against Australia’s third-largest mining company. Yet, as Bennetts argues in his review, the Yindjibarndi victory is far from decisive given the ‘toothlessness’ of Australia’s heritage legislation. After almost a decade, state and federal governments have yet to ‘deliver the full promise of the 1992 Mabo judgment’.

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Scott Morrison has now been in office longer than any of his four predecessors, and yet what do we really know of the man? In today’s episode, political historian and commentator Judith Brett rounds out our picture of the prime minister by patching together recent profiles of the elusive ‘ScoMo’ by Annika Smethurst, Lech Blaine, and Sean Kelly. Brett identifies a host of traits – from his habitual blame-shifting to an ability to compartmentalise the Christian morality governing his private life – that have helped shape his political fortunes. Behind the veneer of ‘ordinariness’ lurks a pragmatic opportunist whose avoidance of scrutiny is itself now being scrutinised. This essay is the cover feature of our upcoming November issue, available to read in full from October 29.

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Tim Bonyhady is one of Australia’s leading environmental lawyers and cultural historians. He has previously traced connections between art and national mythologies in books such as Images in Opposition (1985) and The National Picture (2018). In his latest work, Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium, he turns his attention to Afghanistan, unpicking the fabric of contemporary Afghan society by following closely the warp and weft of its visual culture, from women’s fashion to war rugs to photography. In today’s episode, Morag Fraser reviews Bonyhady’s book, writing in the wake of the Taliban victory and immersing herself in the ‘intriguingly tangential and complex history’ woven by one of Australia’s most scrupulous and sensitive observers of culture. Morag Fraser, a previous chairperson of ABR, has been writing for the magazine since the 1990s.

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Colson Whitehead is a critically acclaimed American author of eight novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Underground Railroad (2016) and The Nickel Boys (2019). His latest work, Harlem Shuffle, set in the titular neighbourhood in the 1960s, is branded as a probing crime caper of ‘heists, shakedowns and rip-offs’. Whitehead’s previous novels are marked by nuanced commentary on race and power, yet, as Mindy Gill argues in her review, this dynamic threatens a tantalising foray into genre fiction: ‘What prevents Harlem Shuffle from being a convincing crime novel, then, is part of its broader failure: Whitehead’s reluctance to depart from rousing social messaging.’

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Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s diagnosis of the condition of ‘bare life’ has assumed a new significance during the coronavirus outbreak. A new book, Where Are We Now? The epidemic as politics, collects some of Agamben’s most thought-provoking commentary on the politics of state responses to Covid-19. In today’s episode, David Jack reads his October article ‘Bare life and health terror’, in which he applies some of Agamben’s key insights to Australia, arguing that the philosopher’s willingness to speak up for the preservation of the foundations of civic life offers a tonic to the atmosphere of alarmism and the new medically endorsed state of exception.

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It’s difficult to imagine a more hotly anticipated novel than Irish author Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You. Fiercely embargoed advance copies have sold for vast sums on eBay, and British publisher Faber even set up a custom Sally Rooney store – featuring branded bucket hats, tote bags, and a coffee truck. The author’s two prior works, Conversations with Friends and Normal People, garnered critical acclaim for their insights into young love in the modern age, with pundits even declaring her ‘the first great Millennial novelist’. ABR critic Beejay Silcox delves into Rooney’s latest work for our October issue, available to read tomorrow, September 30. In today’s episode, Beejay first discusses the entangled process of critiquing Beautiful World, Where Are You, before reading her review in full.

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In the pre-television era of the early twentieth century, radio reigned supreme. It offered news and light entertainment, but also a means of communion and solidarity for the many women confined to the domestic sphere. In her new book Sound Citizens, historian Dr Catherine Fisher explores how a cohort of professional women broadcasters, activists, and politicians began utilising radio to improve the status and rights of women in Australia. In today’s episode, we hear from writer and historian Dr Yves Rees, who reviewed the book for ABR’s recent September issue. Rees is a David Myers Research Fellow in History at La Trobe University and co-host of the history podcast Archive Fever. Yves has published widely across Australian gender, transnational and economic history, and also writes on transgender identity and politics.

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ABR’s Calibre Essay Prize is one of the world’s leading prizes for an original essay. This year, we received a record field of 638 essays. Today we hear from Anita Punton, who placed second for her essay ‘May Day’, a poignant memoir about piecing together her father’s life after his death. Our judges – Sheila Fitzpatrick, Billy Griffiths, and Peter Rose – described Punton’s essay as ‘a rich and moving evocation of a relationship between father and daughter’, one ‘written with humour and flair, offering a complex portrait of Punton’s father: a brilliant, narcissistic man, whose life was full of contradictions.’

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‘Other biographers write about him as if he were a normal person, not the weirdest man who ever lived.’ So says Frances Wilson, British author of the book Burning Man (Bloomsbury), a radical new biography of the captivating and contentious D.H. Lawrence. Geordie Williamson, who reviewed Burning Man for ABR’s August issue, described it as a ‘meta-biography’ that is ‘lovely on the page, often thrilling in its daring’. In today’s episode, Wilson sits down with ABR Editor Peter Rose to discuss the complexities of writing about the enigmatic Lawrence.

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In today’s episode, listen to Joel Deane read his review of An Ugly Truth by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, an account of Facebook’s meddling in the 2016 US elections that ushered Donald Trump into the Oval Office. Joel Deane argues that despite Zuckerberg’s show of civic-mindedness, Facebook’s data-mining enterprise has always been driven by contempt for its users – a manipulable mass of ‘dumb fucks’, as Zuckerberg once put it.

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This year, the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize received nearly 1500 entries from thirty-six different countries, a record field. Placed third was ‘A Fall from Grace’ by John Richards. The story is the first work of historical fiction to appear on the shortlist of the Jolley Prize. In today’s episode, listen to the author read ‘A Fall from Grace’, which our judges described as ‘a deliciously enigmatic story, rich in the overtones of the international canon: Balzac, Calvino, Borges. Set in pre-revolutionary rural France, a talented painter’s career receives an unforeseen jolt that simultaneously shadows his life and propels his work from realist proficiency to metaphysical greatness.’

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In today’s episode, ABR looks back at the winner of the inaugural Calibre Essay Prize in 2007: ‘An Die Nachgeborenen: For Those Who Come After’ by Elisabeth Holdsworth. Holdsworth was born in the Netherlands in the years following World War II. Zeeland, where she grew up, was heavily bombed during the war and later flooded. Her poignant essay is a dialogue with the past, detailing her recent return to the Netherlands, her family’s vicissitudes and suffering during the war, and an unforgettable portrait of her conflicted mother.

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Recently, for the eleventh time, ABR presented the Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. This year the Prize attracted 1,428 entries, from thirty-six different countries. In a virtual ceremony last night, ABR named Camilla Chaudhary as the winner of this year’s Jolley Prize for her story titled ‘The Enemy, Asyndeton’. The judges – Melinda Harvey, Elizabeth Tan, and Gregory Day – described Chaudhary’s entry as ‘a delightful, nimble story; the characters bristle with life, and the dialogue is crisply rendered’. In today’s episode, listen to Camilla Chaudhary read her story in its entirety.

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Few books have had as decisive an impact on the history of Indigenous Australian land management as Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu. And yet, as Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe argue in Farmers or Hunter-gatherers?, the foundations upon which Pascoe builds his account of Indigenous agriculture may be shakier than first thought. In his review of Sutton and Walshe’s book, writer and anthropologist Stephen Bennetts assesses not only their criticisms of Pascoe’s claims, but also the surrounding controversy that has turned a scholarly debate into another theatre in a culture war. What this political furore threatens to obscure is the long tradition of Australian anthropological research that has been essential to the legal restoration of Indigenous land ownership.

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On 4 August 2020, Theodore Ell was living in Beirut, Lebanon, when an explosion erupted at the local port, killing more than 200 people and injuring more than 7,500. Ell and his wife, a diplomat, survived, but were badly shaken. At the encouragement of his close friend Beejay Silcox, Ell turned his experience into the essay ‘Façades of Lebanon’, a harrowing, intimate piece of reportage, and the deserving winner of the 2021 Calibre Essay Prize. In today’s episode, listen to Ell in conversation with Silcox about the inception of his prize-winning work, the balancing act of writing trauma and place, the historical complexities of Beirut, and more.

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Francis Webb, an Australian poet born in 1925, was widely regarded by his contemporaries as one of the most gifted poets of his generation. His creative output was extensive, despite a troubled life living with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. His first major poem, 'A Drum for Ben Boyd', appeared in book form when he was only twenty-two. In today's episode, listen to ABR's Sydney theatre critic Ian Dickson read the poem in its entirety.

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Theodore Ell was living in Beirut, Lebanon, on 4 August 2020 when an explosion devastated the city and shook a nation already teetering on the brink of economic collapse. Ell and his wife, a diplomat, were badly affected, but survived.

Ell's essay, 'Façades of Lebanon', intertwines the author's outsider observation of the nation with a harrowing personal experience of the blast. It represents reportage at its best, and is a fitting winner of the 2021 Calibre Prize.

In today's episode, listen to Theodore Ell read 'Façades of Lebanon' in full.

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In 2020, the Victorian government declared it would establish a Truth and Justice process to ‘recognise historic wrongs and address ongoing injustices for Aboriginal Victorians’. The Yoo-rrook Justice Commission was announced in March this year as the governing body of this process, one to be led by five commissioners and invested with the powers of a royal commission.

In today’s episode, Paul Muldoon reads his essay from the July issue, ‘The prison of the past’, which considers the future challenges and complexities facing the commission. As he writes: ‘In truth and reconciliation, “healing” has come to assume a central importance. But exactly who or what is being healed?’

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As the world realigns itself in the wake of a global pandemic, ABR turns its thoughts to the various forms – individual and institutional, material and more intangible – that recovery may take. In 'Poetry in times of recovery', we asked a number of Australian poets to share the works that best capture how recovery can look, sound, and feel. Today’s episode builds on the popularity of our ‘Poetry in troubled times’ episodes, released in 2020.

We bear in mind, of course, that these are still troubled times, as recent events in the Middle East and the intractable problems (to do with sovereignty and borders) back home well attest. Poetry may not be the only balm we need at this juncture, but in ‘the nightmare of the dark’, as W.H. Auden once put it, the poet’s ‘unconstraining voice’ nevertheless remains a place where ‘the healing fountain starts’.

All readers, poems, and times each reader appears: Sarah Holland-Batt – Adam Zagajewski, 'Try to Praise the Mutilated World' (1:25) Anders Villani – Jamaal May, 'There Are Birds Here' (3:32) and Tomas Tranströmer 'Kyrie' (5:47) Felicity Plunkett – Tracy K. Smith, 'An Old Story' (7:01) Louis Klee – Ralf Webb, 'Love Story: The Back Pages' (8:40) and excerpt from Lucy Hutchinson’s translation of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (10:49) Jenny Harrison – Eavan Boland, 'Lullaby' (13:39) Peter Goldsworthy – Eugenio Montale, 'Forse un mattino' (15:31) Caitlin Maling – Theodore Roethke, 'The Waking' (16:41) Judith Bishop – Tomas Tranströmer, 'Face to Face' (19:14) Thuy On – Thuy On, 'Beautiful Mess' (21:03) John Kinsella – Emily Brontë, 'No Coward Soul is Mine' (22:09)

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In today's episode, Josephine Rowe – winner of the 2016 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize – reads a new short story, 'Bunker', which appears in the June issue of ABR. Josephine has published three short story collections and a novel called A Loving, Faithful Animal.

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Patrick White, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, has long been considered Australia’s finest novelist. And yet, the thirtieth anniversary of his death in 2020 passed by with barely a murmur. Was this merely a consequence of the pandemic, or are there larger cultural forces at play? In today's episode, historian and ABR Calibre prize-winning essayist Martin Thomas considers the posthumous neglect of the great Australian writer, who once described himself as a ‘Londoner at heart’ and who continues to challenge jingoistic and complacent forms of nationalism.

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In today's episode, Ilana Snyder – President of the New Israel Fund Australia – places the recent turmoil in Israel and Palestine in the context of the all-too-familiar cycle of tension, violence, and ceasefire that has beset the region for decades. What might it take for there to be an enduring peace? Snyder examines this question, while also identifying what sets the most recent violence apart from previous eruptions: an increase in ‘intercommunal violence’ that ‘has pitted Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel against one another on streets where they have lived side by side for decades’.

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Richard Flanagan's new work, Toxic, is a startling exposé on Tasmania's salmon farming industry. From genetically altered 'frankenfish' to the use of dangerous chemicals to turn 'dead-grey flesh a marketable red', the industrial machinations uncovered in Flanagan's new work are stomach-churning. As James Boyce writes in his review, 'After the publication of Toxic, I doubt Tasmania will ever be the same again.'

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Throughout her childhood, Krissy Kneen was surrounded by make-believe. At the centre of this enchanted world was her grandmother Lotty, whose prodigious fabulations not only kept her family in thrall, but also hid painful memories of poverty and forced migration. In her new memoir, The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen, Kneen retraces her grandmother's journey from Slovenia to Australia. In today's episode, Kneen sits down with her friend Beejay Silcox, a past ABR Fellow and longtime contributor, to discuss their serendipitous meeting and Kneen's journey to uncover her family's history.

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Harold Bloom was one of the last of the so-called ‘Yale critics’, who shaped the terrain of literary criticism in the latter half of the twentieth century. Bloom died in October 2019, and his final book, Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles, arrives two years after his death and caps a long and controversial career. In this issue, James Ley surveys this swansong by a critic who ‘came to style himself less as a theorist and more as a theologian of literature: the high priest and only admitted member of his own private religion’.

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African American Poetry is an ambitious and wide-ranging collection of Black poetry. Edited by Kevin Young, a fellow poet and poetry editor of The New Yorker, the collection spans contemporary writers such as the Pulitzer Prize-winner Jericho Brown to literary giants such as Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Derek Walcott. As David Mason writes, 'It needs to be said and said again just how profoundly American this poetry is, how it enriches culture and should not be ignored among the more conventionally canonised.'

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Written by award-winning historian Lucy Delap, Feminisms challenges the obfuscating binaries of the 'feminist waves'. Its main focus looks into aspects of feminism that have often been in conflict or overlooked by contemporary movements. Zora Simic reviews the book for our current April issue, and describes it as ‘building on and acknowledging the work of those who came before, while bringing new ideas and energy to the task.' Listen to Zora read her full review in today's episode.

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Over the past year the pandemic has devastated the performing arts in Australia. Theatre especially has been adversely impacted. In today’s episode, theatre critic and ABR regular Tim Byrne looks at how theatre organisations are coping now that venues are beginning to reopen. He interviews a range of artistic directors spanning Melbourne Theatre Company’s departing Brett Sheehy, Queensland Theatre Lee Lewis, Malthouse Theatre’s Matthew Lutton, and many more.

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In the wake of Brittany Higgins's startling allegations of sexual abuse in Parliament House, Beejay Silcox revisits her review of Witness by award-winning journalist Louise Milligan. Witness (recently shortlisted in the 2021 Stella Prize) is an interrogative critique of the criminal trial process. It is the culmination of five years of research into how witnesses are treated (and often intimidated or worse) in court rooms.

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This week our subject is Cy Twombly, one of the most celebrated artists of the twentieth century. A new major exhibition of his work, Cy Twombly: Making Past Present, organised by the MFA in Boston and the Getty Museum in LA, surveys Twombly's immense debt to antiquity. Patrick McCaughey reviews the related catalogue for our upcoming April issue. In this wide-ranging conversation with Peter Rose, he also talks about the plight of US museums during the pandemic, the vexed question of de-accessioning, and the diaries of Fred Williams, which he is currently editing.

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This week we turn to My Octopus Teacher, a documentary that has proven controversial since its publication on Netflix in late 2020. As Anne Rutherford discusses in her luminous review, My Octopus Teacher follows the descent of Craig Foster, naturalist and filmmaker, into the briny world of a particular octopus. The documentary captures the burgeoning affinity between free-diver and cephalopod, prompting questions of anthropomorphism and to what extent humankind can establish a meaningful connection with the animal kingdom.

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In 2017, Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his masterful novels, which, in the judges’ words, uncover 'the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world'. His new work, Klara and the Sun, is his first novel published since winning the Nobel Prize. In today's episode, Beejay Silcox discusses the novel and our expectations of the author, and reads in full her review which appears in ABR's March issue.

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Australian universities are doing it tough – hit hard by the pandemic, compelled to find new ways of teaching during lockdown, and confronted by a federal government ostensibly unsympathetic to much of their work, especially in the humanities. International education – formerly one of Australia’s most lucrative export industries – is haemorrhaging. In today's episode, Peter Tregear – academic, author, critic – reads his review of Australian Universities: A history of common cause by Gwilym Croucher and James Waghorne, published by UNSW Press.

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Paul Kildea is a man of many parts – author, musician, new artistic director of Musica Viva – and a regular contributor to ABR. In this week’s podcast, he talks to Peter Rose about the challenges of programming Musica Viva’s season during a pandemic and about Benjamin Britten, whose opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a highlight of the 2021 Adelaide Festival. Paul Kildea – who will conduct the opera – is the author of a biography of Britten.

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In today’s episode, Naama Grey-Smith reads her review of At the Edge of the Solid World, the second book of fiction by the Australian writer Daniel Davis Wood. The novel follows the breakdown of the lives of a man and wife in the aftermath of the death of their firstborn. Naama Grey-Smith, an editor, publisher and critic based in Fremantle, Western Australia, reviews the book for ABR’s January-February issue – describing it as ‘a masterclass in wedding form to content’.

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In today's episode of the ABR Podcast Tim Byrne discusses his review of Mark Mordue's new biography of Nick Cave with ABR Digital Editor Jack Callil.

Tim Byrne’s review of Boy on Fire appears in the January-February issue.

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The events of January 6 shocked the world. In this episode of the ABR Podcast Samuel Watts reads his article 'This Is America' and offers a historical perspective. As Watts notes, 'To view the assault on the US Capitol as the climax of a dramatic, but brief, period of authoritarianism in the US is a potentially dangerous mistake. This attack was just the latest iteration in a long-lasting tradition of anti-democratic, white supremacist violence that has plagued the Republic since, at least, the Civil War.'

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The Peter Porter Poetry Prize, now in its seventeenth year and worth a total of $10,000, attracted more than 1300 entries from 33 different countries this year. It’s our pleasure now to present the five shortlisted poets, who will introduce and read their shortlisted poems. Their poems appear online and in the January–February print edition of ABR. Single print issues can be bought here.

The overall winner (who will receive $6,000) won’t be known until the Porter Prize ceremony on January 27. Join us then at 5 pm Melbourne time for this online ceremony. This is a free event, but bookings are required via rsvp@australianbookreview.com.au (an access link for the event will be sent to you via email closer to the date).

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Earlier this year, the National Archives of Australia – after an epic legal battle – finally released the Palace Letters, a substantial cache of correspondence shedding light on the involvement of Buckingham Palace in the lead-up to the dismissal of Gough Whitlam in 1975. In today's episode, Jon Piccini talks with Peter Rose about two new books that interrogate the significance of the letters: The Truth of the Palace Letters by Paul Kelly and Troy Bramston, and The Palace Letters by Jenny Hocking. Piccini reviews both titles in his review in our upcoming January–February issue.

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Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles de Gaulle are two of the most polarising figures in French history. In today’s episode, Peter Rose talks to leading historian Peter McPhee about Patrice Gueniffey’s new book on the lasting impact of these two leaders and the French people’s fascination with ‘great men’.

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In today's episode, Peter Rose talks to writers Beejay Silcox and Billy Griffiths about what they’ve been reading during this tumultuous year. They also speculate about some highlights of 2021. For those looking for a more extensive listing of this year's finest works, our Books of the Year features more than 30 different ABR critics nominating their favourite releases.

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Amanda Laugesen, historian and lexicographer, is director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre at the ANU. In her latest book, the evocatively titled Rooted, Amanda considers the bountiful history of bad language in Australia. Her column in the December issue of ABR is devoted to the quaint old euphemism. Amanda talks about the inventive ways in which writers and editors have tried to placate the censor while also celebrating profanity.

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In today's episode, Amy Baillieu speaks to Nicole Abadee about Sofie Laguna's latest novel, Infinite Splendours. In her November issue review, Abadee reflects that Laguna 'does not shy away from confronting subject matter' and notes that Infinite Splendours represents 'new territory' for Laguna as it follows protagonist Lawrence from childhood into adulthood. Baillieu and Abadee also discuss Abadee's own podcast Books Books Books.

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Kylie Maslen's début essay collection, Show Me Where It Hurts, is an intimate exploration of living with chronic illness. Maslen describes her own experiences with the invisible illness she has lived with for the last twenty years, delving into its daily reality while incorporating music, literature, television, film, online culture, and more. Kate Crowcroft, who reviews the book in ABR's November issue, describes it as 'essential reading for those of us with the privilege of having a body that behaves itself'.

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In today's episode, Joshua Black reads his tribute to former Labor senator Susan Ryan, featured in our November issue. Ryan was a historic figure in Australian politics: she was the first woman from the ALP to serve in cabinet, and cemented her legacy with the Sex Discrimination Act (1984) – which prohibited sexual discrimination in the workplace. Here, Black recounts his interview with the pioneering politician only weeks before her death on 27 September 2020.

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In today's episode, Hessom Razavi – the ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellow – speaks to Peter Rose about his essay 'Failures of imagination: From Tehran’s prisons to Australia’s immigration detention centres', which appears in the November issue. Hessom's essay offers a powerful reflection on the experiences that led to his family fleeing Iran to escape political persecution. Navigating the 1979 Islamic Revolution, political rebellion, and tragic family disappearances, Razavi examines the similarities between Australia’s immigration detention centres and the political prison he visited as a boy – and contemplates how easily the detainees’ fate might have been his own.

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Is it possible to parse Australian writers by states and territories? In today's episode, Tony Hughes-d'Aeth – Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia – speculates about new ways of contemplating Australian writers through the lens of regionality.

As he writes in his essay 'Thinking in a regional accent: New ways of contemplating Australian writers': 'Yes, we are divided into states and territories, but are these anything other than lines on a map, drawn with a ruler and a set square, and the occasional river? The contrast between the political map of Australia and the now iconic AIATSIS map of Indigenous Australia graphically exposes the poverty of the Australian regional imagination and the essential irreality of our territorial demarcations. More particularly, for someone like me, is it right to conceive of Australia in terms of literary regions?'

Tony Hughes-d'Aeth is author of Paper Nation (2001) and Like Nothing on This Earth (2017).

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Whatever we might think of him, Donald Trump has proven to be one of the most transformative figures in recent history. In today's episode, Timothy J. Lynch talks to ABR Editor Peter Rose about three new and highly critical books on Trump: Too Much and Never Enough by Mary Trump, A Very Stable Genius by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, and The Room Where It Happened by John Bolton. As Lynch writes in his review, 'There is a paradox that these books illustrate but cannot resolve: why is a man so chaotic, so reviled, so malignant also so transformational?’

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Amid growing disquiet about ‘cancel culture’ and censorious voices on social media, Melbourne journalist Johanna Leggatt explores the threat Twitter poses to the work of writers and journalists. Beginning with the recent case of Rachel Baxendale, a journalist at The Australian, who was subjected to much invective because of her persistent questions about the quarantine fiasco in Victoria, Leggatt laments the ‘routine trashing of reputations on Twitter’ and wonders why Twitter has ‘devolved into a channel for our most juvenile emotions’.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, Peter Rose speaks to Michael L. Ondaatje (Professor of History at the Australian Catholic University) about black American voters’ attitudes towards Donald Trump and the Republican Party. They also discuss recent startling developments in an already tumultuous presidential election.

Michael L. Ondaatje’s article ‘“What the hell do you have to lose?” Black and Republican in the age of Trump’ is one of a series of commentaries funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. It appears in the October issue.

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This year's ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize was won by Mykaela Saunders for 'River Story', which Mykaela reads for another episode of the ABR Podcast. Placed second in the prize was C.J. Garrow for 'Egg Timer', which explores pandemical times through the eyes of a child. CJ Garrow has been shortlisted for other international prizes, including the Fish Prize in Ireland and the George Garrett Fiction Prize in the United States.

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In today's episode, author and critic James Bradley speaks to ABR's digital editor Jack Callil about David Mitchell's latest novel, Utopia Avenue. Mitchell is perhaps best known for Cloud Atlas (2004), a work of sprawling interconnected narratives. In a similar vein, Utopia Avenue traces the lives of four band members during their rise to fame during the bustle of the 1960s. Yet as James Bradley details, the book is less concerned with history or music than with its own 'metaphysical game'.

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The Calibre Essay Prize, now in its fourteenth year, goes on producing some of the finest longform essays from around the world. This year we received about 600 entries from 29 different countries. The overall prize went to Yves Rees for their essay 'Reading the Mess Backwards', which Yves reads in a recent podcast episode.

Placed second was 'The Dolorimeter' by Sydney-based poet and academic Kate Middleton. Kate's essay, which appears in the September issue of ABR, is a personal meditation on her experience with illness and dealing with the medical profession over many years.

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We continue our poetry podcasts with the first in a series of readings by poets living in a particular state. It complements in a way ABR’s old States of Poetry anthologies (all still available online).

This time we’re inviting a number of poets to record a poem of theirs that is set outside their home state (whether interstate or overseas – or indeed in space, as you will hear). The poems can be published or unpublished ones. We list all the readers and poems on our website. Given the present lockdown in that state, we’re starting in Victoria. After all, if we can't leave home, we might as well do so imaginatively.

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Language has always been shaped by the times. In today's episode, Amanda Laugesen, Director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre, reveals how the national vocabulary has been transformed by recession, depression, financial crises, and periods of high unemployment. A list to which we somberly might add the current pandemic.

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In today's episode, listen to Mykaela Saunders read the entirety of her remarkable 'River Story', which won this year's ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Mykaela is a Koori writer, teacher, and community researcher. Of Dharug and Lebanese ancestry, she’s working-class and queer, and belongs to the Tweed Aboriginal community. Mykaela has worked in Aboriginal education since 2003, and her research explores trans-generational trauma and healing in her community.

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Fire Front, edited by Gomeroi author and scholar Alison Whittaker, is an anthology of contemporary First Nations poetry. Featuring several eminent Australian writers – including Ellen van Neerven, Tony Birch, Alexis Wright, and many more – this collection serves as a testament to the contemporary renaissance of First Nations poetry. It is divided into five thematic sections, each introduced by an essay written by a prominent Aboriginal writer and thinker, such as Bruce Pascoe, Ali Cobby Eckermann, and Evelyn Araluen.

In this episode, listen to Declan Fry discuss Fire Front before reading his review of the book.

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Andy Warhol, who died in 1987, remains one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. His works command stratospheric prices, yet many regard him as a huckster, vacuous and inflated. He perfected a kind of celebrity: the denizen of Studio 54, the consort of Lee Radziwill and all, and fame became for Warhol a kind of obsession.

In today's episode, Paul McDermott – comedian, writer, and occasional painter – examines this contradictory artist in a new biography by Blake Gopnik.

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The Peter Porter Poetry Prize is one of the world's leading prizes for an unpublished poem. It's named after one of Australia's finest poets, and a regular contributor to ABR. Now in its seventeenth year, the Porter Prize is worth a total of $10,000. Entries are open now, with a closing date of October 1. For more information, visit our website.

As poets polish their poems both here and overseas, here's an opportunity to listen to all winning poems, going right back to 2005. There's nothing like hearing an author read their own work, and each poem in this episode is read by the poets themselves.

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ABR has published an environment issue every year since 2014, with our next one appearing in October. This themed issue has transformed our coverage of sustainability, climate change and the environment – right throughout the year.

During this ever-worsening climate crisis, it’s good to look back at the ABR Fellowship essay that appeared in our 2015 environment issue – Ashley Hay’s ‘The Forest at the Edge of Time’. Ashley has published novels and multiple works of non-fiction. In 2002, Ashley published Gum, a book that explores the eucalypt. Here she revisits the ‘majestic or scrawny’ gum.

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In today's episode, we present James Ley’s hilarious and deeply serious review of The Trials of Portnoy by Patrick Mullins. James channels the memorable prose of Philip Roth himself. Mullins’s book chronicles the legal spat that surrounded Penguin's attempt to publish Portnoy's Complaint, Roth's controversial novel that was considered lewd and offensive by Australia's censuring authorities.

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It’s Jolley time again! In August we’ll name the winner of the 2020 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. It’s timely then to revisit last year’s winner: Sonja Dechian's poignant story 'The Point-Blank Murder', which was selected by judges Maxine Beneba Clarke, John Kinsella, and Beejay Silcox from a field of thirteen hundred and fifty entries. In today's episode, Sonja Dechian reads 'The Point-Blank Murder' in full.

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Each year, ABR publishes an issue dedicated to sustainability, climate change, and the environment. In today’s episode, we look back on Stephen Orr’s Eucalypt Fellowship essay, which was the feature of the October 2017 issue of ABR. His essay, ‘Ambassadors from Another Time’, attempts to understand Australia’s complex relationship with the eucalypt, examining the nation’s evolving understanding of these iconic trees.

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What's it like losing a parent amid a pandemic? How do we mourn and celebrate when Covid-19 has made all public gatherings problematic? In her highly personal essay 'Contested breath', Sarah Walker explores with wit, humour and an unforgettable poignancy the experience of her mother's death during the coronavirus pandemic, and how to find the space to grieve when the world itself is shaken.

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The Calibre Essay Prize is one of the world's leading prizes for an original non-fiction essay. This year was the fourteenth time ABR has presented the prize, which is now worth a total of $7,500. The winner of this year's prize is Dr Yves Rees, whose essay is titled 'Reading the Mess Backwards'. Rees, who came out as transgender aged 31, describes their essay as 'a story of trans becoming that digs into the messiness of bodies, gender, and identity'. The full essay appears in the June-July 2020 issue of ABR.

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Gwen Harwood, who died in 1995, was born on 8 June 1920, in Brisbane, of course, which she loved dearly. Harwood seems increasingly to have been one of the finest poets Australia has ever produced. She was much loved; anyone who knew her relished her wit, her directness, her inextinguishable spirit. To mark the centenary of her birth, ABR asked a number of her colleagues and admirers to record some of her poems. Happily, there are hundreds of them to explore.

Readers include Stephanie Trigg, Ann-Marie Priest, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Larry Sitsky, Sarah Holland-Batt, Robyn Archer, and more.

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Lexicographers, not just newspapers and television, respond to disasters. Language is never fixed, never finished, never done. In recent months, language has been shaped by the coronavirus. In this episode, Amanda Laugesen, director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre at ANU and editor of The Australian National Dictionary, discusses coronaspeak, the language of lockdown.

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Lisa Gorton began publishing in ABR in 2003. Since then she's given us several dozen review essays and poems. Lisa has published three poetry collections, most recently the acclaimed Empirical, a Giramondo publication. Her novel, The Life of Houses, shared the 2016 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction. This month we published Lisa's long poem 'On the Characterisation of Male Poets' Mothers'. As Lisa explains, the poem almost entirely comprises a medley of quotes that describe famous poets' mothers – sourced all from Wikipedia.

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Hessom Razavi offers a powerful reflection on the current Covid-19 crisis. Dr Razavi, an ophthalmologist, reflects on his own clinical experiences and interviews with senior medicos (including Dr Nick Coatsworth, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer) to provide a nuanced and compelling portrait of our changing lives. He examines the ways in which society has responded to the pandemic and questions what kind of world his daughter (due shortly) will be born into.

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All literature, but poetry in particular for some of us, becomes more important during the pandemic. Last month, we invited a group of poets and critics to read favourite poems of theirs, from any country or century. We know how much you enjoyed it; the response has been fantastic. So we've invited fifteen more poets and poetry lovers to read a poem that resonates for them and that might speak to others as we hunker down and live more privately. All the readers, poets, and titles of poems are listed on our website.

Featuring Kate Middleton, Jaya Savige, Anthony Lawrence, Claire G. Coleman, Warwick Hadfield, Sarah Day, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Kevin Brophy, Andrea Goldsmith, Michael Farrell, Geoffrey Lehmann, Maria Takolander, Ali Alizadeh, and Thom Sullivan.

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During the Covid-19 crisis, many of us are surfeiting on television drama from Netflix, Stan, and the rest of them. Back in 2015, we published James McNamara's Ian Potter Foundation Fellowship essay 'The Golden Age of Television?', which considers the ascendancy of television drama and its cultural significance. Listen to James reading his essay, which appears in ABR's film and television issue in April 2015.

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Peter Rose – before introducing this week’s ABR Podcast guest – updates readers on ABR’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the Australia Council’s inexplicable decision not to fund ABR in 2021–24.

Then Robyn Archer – renowned performer and ABR Laureate – currently hunkering down in Melbourne, reflects on how people are surviving and what Australia might look like when it emerges from this crisis.

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The extraordinary life of Truganini, an Aboriginal woman known as the 'last Tasmanian', is explored in this turbulent history by Cassandra Pybus. An inspiring and haunting story, Truganini’s life spanned psychological and cultural shifts nearly beyond comprehension.

In this episode of The ABR Podcast, Billy Griffiths, author of the award-winning Deep Time Dreaming, reviews Truganini, Pybus's history of a woman reclaimed by the Tasmanian Indigenous community as a symbol of 'rights, identity, ownership, and survival'.

Music credit: Moonrise by Chad Crouch is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.

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The imminent closure of Australian Associated Press, or AAP, has sounded alarm bells for many citizens and journalists already worried about the lack of media diversity in Australia. AAP has long played a fundamental role in investigative journalism, which we need more than ever in an age of government intrusion, evasion, and over-reach. Johanna Leggatt, a journalist who has worked for Fairfax, News Corp, and AAP, writes about this troubling threat to journalism.

Music credit: 'The Light-filtering Canopy (Instrumental)' by Chad Crouch is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.

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In 1975 the governor general, John Kerr, removed a democratically elected Labor government, amid great intrigue and subterfuge. The dismissal of the Whitlam government remains one of the blights on our democracy – perhaps the most controversial event in Australian political history. And yet the full record of what happened in the weeks and months leading up to the dismissal is still unavailable to Australian citizens because of the intransigence of Queen Elizabeth and the expensive lengths to which the National Archives of Australia have gone to suppress access to John Kerr’s correspondence with Buckingham Palace.

Jenny Hocking – emeritus professor of history at Monash University and biographer of Gough Whitlam – has led the case to overturn the National Archives ban. Her article ‘At Her Majesty’s Pleasure: Sir John Kerr and the royal dismissal secrets’ appears in the April issue of ABR.

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At this ominous time, as we all hunker down, hoping for a cure, perhaps only poetry offers true insight and consolation, if we lean on it, as we’ve always done in past crises. In this episode, 18 fine poets and close associates of ABR – such as J.M. Coetzee, Robyn Archer, and Sarah Holland-Batt – read some favourite poems, works that seem to resonate in these anxious times. (All the poems are listed on the episode page).

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‘Nah Doongh’s Song’, Grace Karskens's Calibre Prize-winning essay, examines the unusually long life of one of the first Aboriginal children who grew up in conquered land. Born around 1800, Nah Doongh lived until 1898. Her losses, her peregrinations, her strong, dignified character are the subjects of this questing essay, in which Karskens states: ‘Biography is not a finite business; it’s a process, a journey. I have been researching, writing, and thinking about Nah Doongh … for over a decade now.’ The discoveries she makes along the way – the portrait she finally tracks down – are very stirring.

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Since 2007, the Calibre Essay Prize has generated many thousands of new essays. This year alone, we received about 600 entries from around the world. In this week's episode, we look back at one of the most popular Calibre Prize-winning essays, Michael Adams's highly personal essay 'Salt Blood' – which introduced many of us to the phenomenon known as free diving.

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ABR’s Calibre Essay Prize is one of the world’s leading prizes for an original essay. When the 2020 Prize closed recently we had received nearly 600 entries – a record field. I’m judging them now with Lisa Gorton and J.M. Coetzee. For this bonus episode of The ABR Podcast, we look back at Martin Thomas’s essay ‘"Because it’s your country": Bringing Back the Bones to West Arnhem Land'. This essay, which won the 2013 Calibre Prize, examines the violation and restitution of Aboriginal remains.

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After this calamitous summer – this 'season of reckoning', as he puts it – celebrated historian Tom Griffiths reflects on names given to bushfires – all those Black Sundays and Mondays, etc. – and wonders if they truly capture what is new about this savage summer. His article appears in our March issue.

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Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments – a coda to her celebrated novel The Handmaid’s Tale – was one of the most anticipated books of 2019, and it went on to share the Booker Prize. Reviews of the novel were mostly warm, but our reviewer, Beejay Silcox, offers a much more qualified reading.

Music: "Garden Music" by Kevin MacLeod
License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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In our new episode, ABR Editor Peter Rose reviews Yellow Notebook, the first volume of the diaries by Helen Garner, a most anticipated book. Here, we delve into Garner's own private musings, the diaries she kept during the pivotal years of her writing life.

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In our new episode, the shortlisted poets for the 2020 Peter Porter Poetry Prize – Lachlan Brown, Claire G. Coleman, Ross Gillett, A. Frances Johnson, and Julie Manning – read their shortlisted poems.

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In our first episode, the poet Michael Hofmann reads his brilliant satire on Donal Dump (aka Donald Trump), and then delves into a discussion about its development and significance in the current age of political tumult.

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