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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, to writing in this register’. What is lost, Dao asks, when we talk in the ‘language of cruelty, dishonour, and cowardice’, when we speak about ‘running … with the mob’? André Dao is an author and postdoctoral research fellow at the Melbourne Law School. He won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, among other prizes, for his début novel Anam (2023). ‘Not a bird or a beach: The costs of living together’ by André Dao is published in the November issue of ABR. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 Cochrane. With its story of female resilience, creativity, and enduring friendship, Ridout’s book is one that ‘should be read’, Wheatley writes. ‘The characters and story are so strong, the Cold War surveillance so spooky, and the message (in the wake of the unsuccessful Voice referendum) so timely’. Nadia Wheatley is the author of The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift, which won The Age Book of the Year in 2001 and the Australian History Prize at the New South Wales Premier’s History Awards in 2002. ‘Fact and fiction: A story of two legendary women’ by Nadia Wheatley is published in the October issue of ABR. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 pressure’. Life of M is a novel that makes an ‘enigma’ of both its narrator and its author, Macris writes: it is ‘like watching two sphinxes circle one another … guarding at all costs their essential unknowability’. Anthony Macris is Adjunct Professor of Writing at the University of Technology Sydney. His best-selling autism memoir, When Horse Became Saw (2011), was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and The Age Book of the Year.  ‘Sphinx and her double: A Woolfian celebration of the moment’ by Anthony Macris is published in the October issue of ABR. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 underpinned Keane’s political analysis for years’. Keane presents merely a ‘well-intentioned’, ‘tinkering’ approach to policy in his book: ‘none of this is new, let alone bold, thinking’. Emma Dawson is Executive Director of the Chifley Research Centre. She was previously a senior policy adviser in both the Rudd and Gillard governments. ‘To kill the pig: Politics that misses the moment’ by Emma Dawson is published in the October issue of ABR. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 writes, pushing them ‘to the edge of their psychological, social, and political readiness’ to hear her testimony. Cheryl Leavy is from the Kooma and Nguri nations in western and central Queensland. She is the 2026 winner of the Peter Porter Poetry Prize and its inaugural First Nations winner. In 2022, Cheryl was awarded the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Indigenous Poetry Prize. She has been published by Cordite, Griffith Review, Southerly, and The Guardian. ‘Fierce ground: Laying down songline’ by Cheryl Leavy is published in the September issue of ABR. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 devil’ whose correspondence over many years, including in her final months, he recently discovered in his attic. Peter Goldsworthy published a memoir titled The Cancer Finishing School (2024) and is the author of the poetry collection Tomorrow, published earlier this year and reviewed by Lisa Gorton in the July issue of ABR. ‘“He lives eternally who lives in the present”: On lost sonnets and wandering through paradise with Gwen Harwood’ by Peter Goldsworthy is published in the September issue of ABR. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 Nature Writing Prize is now open, and the winning essay, which attracts prize money of $8,000, will be published in the January/February issue of ABR. This year’s judges are Kim Mahood, Dave Witty, and Georgina Arnott. Applications for the prize can be submitted here: https://natureaustralia.submittable.com/submit/358915/2026-nature-writing-prize See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 sister has a life-threatening eating disorder. This year’s judges admired the ‘lucid and exacting prose’ of ‘Peach’, as well as the way it ‘conjures a phenomenal atmosphere of dread’. Ursula Brunetti is a writer living between the Isle of Wight and Paris. She has won the Royal Society of Literature’s V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize and the Oxford Review of Books Short Fiction Prize. She holds a Master of Studies in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford and is currently working on her début novel. ‘Peach’ by Ursula Brunetti is published in the August issue of ABR. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 over forty ‘unyielding, unbowed’ women who dared to take on ‘powerful institutions’ and ‘systems of exclusion’. The result, Haussegger writes, is a gritty exploration of the ‘drama, doubt, and pain associated with winning’. Virginia Haussegger is an award-winning television journalist, writer, and commentator, whose media career spans thirty years. She is Deputy Chair of the media think-tank PIJI, the Public Interest Journalism Initiative, and she hosts BroadTalk, a podcast about women, power, and the wayward world. ‘“What I wanted to signal”: Women navigating the media’ by Virginia Haussegger is published in the August issue of ABR. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 smooth over this tragedy. This year’s judges called ‘Backflip’ a ‘remarkable feat of compression: a coming-of-age story told from a teenage girl’s perspective that is also a tender portrait of an era and a town in the grip of a traumatic disturbance’. Sam Keenan lives in Aotearoa, New Zealand. She won the inaugural Sargeson Prize in 2019 and came second in the Sunday Star-Times short story competition in 2017. Her short stories have been published in Landfall, Sunday Star-Times, and the anthology Middle Distance (2021). Her work often focuses on the social history of Aotearoa. ‘Backflip’ by Sam Keenan is published in the August issue of ABR. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week, on The ABR Podcast, we feature WA Senator Varun Ghosh’s essay, ‘Literary critic as democratic role model’, which discusses the relationship between literary criticism and politics. Ghosh argues that literary critique is crucial to the health of democracy. ‘A strong critical culture is protective of democracy’, he asserts. While there are limits to the comparison between literary critics and democratic representatives,’ Ghosh writes, ‘the habits that underpin good criticism … are also indispensable to good policymaking’. Varun Ghosh is a Senator for Western Australia and previously a lawyer from Perth. He received degrees in Arts and Law from the University of Western Australia and was a Commonwealth Scholar in Law at the University of Cambridge. ‘Literary critic as democratic role model’ is published in the August issue of ABR. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.

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. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.