‘The architecture of erasure’ by Elise Westin

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.