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The ABR Podcast

by The ABR Podcast

Society

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.For more information about ABR, visit our website, www.australianbookreview.com.au

From the show's RSS feed, refreshed Oct 22, 2026. Source feed.

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Episodes

  1. ‘Not a bird or a beach: The costs of living together’ by André Dao

    This week on The ABR Podcast, André Dao reviews Richard Flanagan’s Heresies, observing that one reason to read the essay collection ‘is to watch a master rhetorician at work’, one who is deeply engaged in current political issues. But, Dao insists, there is a cost, ‘or at least a potential cost…

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  2. ‘Fact and fiction: A story of two legendary women’ by Nadia Wheatley

    This week on The ABR Podcast, Nadia Wheatley reviews Sisters in Arms by Sarah Cochrane Ridout, the ‘powerful’ story of two Australian women who worked tirelessly to campaign for constitutional change in the 1967 referendum: Kath Walker, who later changed her name to Oodgeroo Noonuccal, and Kathie...

  3. ‘Sphinx and her double: A Woolfian celebration of the moment’ by Anthony Macris

    This week on The ABR Podcast, Anthony Macris reviews Rachel Cusk’s fictional autobiography, Life of M, finding it ‘particularly strange and compelling’. Interrogating the uncomfortable relationship between selfhood and celebrity, Cusk’s novel questions how human identity ‘warps and buckles under...

  4. ‘To kill the pig: Politics that misses the moment’ by Emma Dawson

    This week on The ABR Podcast, Emma Dawson surveys Bernard Keane’s Seize the Moment, in which Keane grapples with the 2025 Australian federal election result. Australia handed the Albanese government a huge majority in that election and, Dawson writes, ‘disproved the assumptions that have...

  5. ‘Fierce ground: Laying down songline’ by Cheryl Leavy

    This week on The ABR Podcast, Cheryl Leavy reviews Julie Janson’s ‘unsettling and powerful’ poetry collection, My Kaathi Sister, calling it a brand of truth-telling that is ‘embodied, tactile, and troubling’, but ‘never performative’. Janson’s work positions the reader as ‘outcry witness’, Leavy...

  6. ‘“He lives eternally who lives in the present”: On lost sonnets and wandering through paradise with Gwen Harwood’ by Peter Goldsworthy

    This week on The ABR Podcast, Peter Goldsworthy shares a poignant account of writing sonnets by a Brisbane poolside in 1987 with the late poet Gwen Harwood and author Vikram Seth. One of Australia’s greatest poets, Harwood was to her friend and fellow poet Goldsworthy an ‘impish, irreverent…

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  7. The Nature Conservancy’s Nature Writing Prize

    Today’s episode marks a collaboration between ABR and The Nature Conservancy’s Nature Writing Prize as ABR becomes Media Partner of the prize. In the episode, we consider the notion that the way we write about nature shapes the way we see it, value it, and act on its behalf. The eighth biennial...

  8. ‘Peach’ by Ursula Brunetti

    This week on The ABR Podcast, we feature the third-place winner of the 2026 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, ‘Peach’ by Ursula Brunetti. In Brunetti’s riveting coming-of-age story, an exchange student’s stay in the French countryside becomes increasingly tense when she discovers her host’s...

  9. ‘“What I wanted to signal”: Women navigating the media’ by Virginia Haussegger

    This week on The ABR Podcast, Virginia Haussegger reviews Women Who Win by Antoinette Lattouf, a book that is not about ‘the anatomy of winning’, but rather about ‘the impact of fighting’. Using her well-known legal case against the ABC as a narrative framework, Lattouf unfolds the stories of…

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  10. ‘Backflip’ by Sam Keenan

    This week on The ABR Podcast, we feature ‘Backflip’ by New Zealand author Sam Keenan, which placed second in the 2026 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Set in a small New Zealand town in the 1980s, ‘Backflip’ tells the story of a young girl’s disappearance and the community’s attempt to...

  11. ‘Literary critic as democratic role model’ by Varun Ghosh

    This week, on The ABR Podcast, we feature WA Senator Varun Ghosh’s essay, ‘Literary critic as democratic role model’, which discusses the relationship between literary criticism and politics. Ghosh argues that literary critique is crucial to the health of democracy. ‘A strong critical culture is...

  12. ‘C.Q.D.’ by Laura Elvery

    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...

  13. ‘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…

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  14. ‘The lie and the law: The biography of a rogue’ by Lucy Sussex

    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...

  15. ‘And yet: Towards disabled literary utopia’ by Jessica White

    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…

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  16. ‘“Depths that we today are barely able to imagine”: The quality of disinterestedness on the 250th anniversary of the United States of America’ by Clinton Fernandes | The ABR Podcast #282

    This week on The ABR Podcast, we feature Clinton Fernandes’s commentary titled ‘“Depths that we today are barely able to imagine”: The quality of disinterestedness on the 250th anniversary of the United States of America’. Noting that the Trump Cabinet is ‘the wealthiest in modern history, with...

  17. ‘A deeper kind of itch: Poetry of the mirrored plate’ by Lisa Gorton

    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...

  18. ‘Vulnerable to place: Navigating deep blue history’ by Killian Quigley

    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...

  19. ‘Tumbleweed: How the West was lost’ by Maria Takolander

    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...

  20. ‘“One of our rarest gifts”: David Malouf in the pages of Australian Book Review’ by Carissa Chye

    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...

  21. ‘When people ask me about the “situation” in Iran: Locating ourselves and each other through the voices of the vatan’ by Marjon Mossammaparast

    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…

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  22. ‘One bad day: Meditations on commodified flesh’ by Katherine Wilson

    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…

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  23. ‘Too human: Shame, horror, aversion’ by Kevin Hart

    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...

  24. ‘Between reality and dreams’ by Sahar Rabah

    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...

  25. ‘Again and again: More poem than memoir’ by Jane Gleeson-White

    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…

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  26. ‘Rethinking “on”: Sitting and listening to Wright’ by Tony Hughes-d’Aeth

    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...

  27. ‘Progressive legalism in Australia’s High Court: How migration, aliens, and punishment cases reveal a distinct trend’ by Florence Honybun

    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’…

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  28. ‘“May today sink peace into your soul”: New scams in the literary world’ by Dennis Altman

    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…

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  29. ‘Urgent compassion: Paying courageous attention’ by Felicity Plunkett

    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…

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  30. ‘“Suppose I am wrong?”: On writers’ festivals, reassurance, calibration, and risk’ by Simon Tedeschi

    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...

  31. ‘Thinking in public: The vulpine poetry of Chris Wallace-Crabbe’ by Eleanor Spencer-Regan

    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…

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  32. 'Roads to roads: Bathos of the ordinary' by Grace Roodenrys

    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…

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  33. 'Lemmings over a cliff: On political and publishing expediency' by Joel Deane

    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’…

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  34. ‘When universities mattered: Higher education in a country addicted to the plough’ by Stephen Garton

    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…

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  35. ‘Thought’s tempo: Essays that imagine otherwise’ by Mindy Gill

    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...

  36. ‘A truly probabilistic universe: One hundred years of heated debate and mind-bending physics’ by Sara Webb

    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...

  37. ‘Less an author than a milieu: Reading Shakespeare in the New World’ by Stuart Kells

    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...

  38. Peter Porter Poetry Prize 2026 Shortlist

    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…

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  39. 'Carbon bomb: Business models based on climate catastrophe' by Stephen Long

    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...

  40. ‘Skewering AUKUS: A point-by-point account’ by James Curran

    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...

  41. ‘Liars, inventors, embroiderers: Rewriting the life and myth of Charmian Clift’ by Nadia Wheatley

    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...

  42. ‘Understand me now: Poetry which cuts into the work’ by Grace Roodenrys

    This week on the ABR Podcast, Grace Roodenrys reviews KONTRA by Eunice Andrada, observing that the collection draws on a poetics of cultural excavation. As Roodenrys explains, Andrada retrieves and rewrites the ways that women’s bodies have been framed, worshipped, and fetishised. She goes on to...

  43. ‘For shame: Social value of an emotion’ by Jessica Whyte

    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…

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  44. ‘Carte blanche from me’: Volume two in a PM biography by Patrick Mullins

    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...

  45. ‘On so many levels: A sharp yet melancholic account’ by Clare Corbould

    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...

  46. ‘Limerence’ by Rachael Wenona Guy

    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...

  47. ‘Questions for Mai: Joshua Reynolds’s portrait and the memory of Empire’ by Kate Fullagar

    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...

  48. ‘AI will kill us/save us: Hype and harm in the new economic order’ by Judith Bishop

    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...

  49. ‘Sediment’ by Tracey Slaughter

    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...

  50. ‘Albanese’s “Australian Way”: The rise of “progressive patriotism” and its complex past’ by Sean Scalmer

    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…

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About this show

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.For more information about ABR, visit our website, www.australianbookreview.com.au

Hosted by

The ABR Podcast

Produced by Jack Callil

Categories

Society Culture

Frequently asked questions

How many episodes does The ABR Podcast have?

The ABR Podcast has 100 episodes on PodParley. The most recent episode was published on November 5, 2026.

What is The ABR Podcast about?

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...

How often does The ABR Podcast release new episodes?

The ABR Podcast publishes weekly, based on its 100 episodes since July 2024.

Who hosts The ABR Podcast?

The ABR Podcast is created and hosted by The ABR Podcast.
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