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.

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. The winner will be announced at a ceremony on 16 January 2020 in Melbourne. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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. 

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.

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 will appear online in our upcoming March issue.

Etched in Bone, the acclaimed documentary by Martin Thomas on the repatriation of Indigenous remains, is premiering in the US in March. The documentary stems from Thomas's essay ‘"Because it’s your country": Bringing Back the Bones to West Arnhem Land', which won the 2013 ABR Calibre Essay Prize. In this bonus episode of The ABR Podcast, we look back on Thomas's reading of his remarkable essay.

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. 

‘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.

The ABR Podcast is released fortnightly every Wednesday and features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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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 below).

All poets and poems featured:

Robyn Archer reading ‘Bad Times’ by Bertolt Brecht

Judith Bishop reading ‘In Light and Darkness’ by Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Sarah Holland-Batt reading ‘Pavana Dolarosa’ by Geoffrey Hill

Stephen Edgar reading ‘Postscript’ by Seamus Heaney

Morag Fraser reading ‘Stand Whoso List’ by Sir Thomas Wyatt

Peter Goldsworthy reading ‘Rock’ by Jane Hirshfield

Lisa Gorton reading ‘Everyone Sang’ by Siegfried Sassoon

Rodney Hall reading ‘The Fairy Queen’ by Edmund Spenser

J.M. Coetzee reading ‘Mr Cogito’s Eschatological Premonitions’ by Zbigniew Herbert

Peter Rose reading ‘The Plain Sense of Things’ by Wallace Stevens

Ian Dickson reading ‘The Kingdom’ by Louis Macneice

A. Frances Johnson reading ‘Repose in Calamity’ by Henri Michaux and ‘Poem 341’ by Emily Dickinson

John Kinsella reading ‘Sweet Silence After Bells’ by Christopher Brennan

David McCooey reading ‘December Evening 1972’ by Tomas Tranströmer

Beejay Silcox reading ‘The Summer Day’ by Mary Oliver

Alex Skovron reading ‘Earthdom’ by Eugenio Montejo       

Judith Beveridge reading ‘The Thrush’ by Edward Thomas 

Paul Kane reading ‘b o d y’ by James Merrill

The ABR Podcast is released fortnightly every Wednesday and features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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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. 

The ABR Podcast is released fortnightly every Wednesday and features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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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.

The ABR Podcast is released every Wednesday and features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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

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'. 

The ABR Podcast is released every Wednesday and features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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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.

The ABR Podcast is released every Wednesday and features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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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. 

The ABR Podcast is released every Wednesday and features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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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 below. 

Kate Middleton reads ‘Lake Superior’ by Lorine Niedecker

Jaya Savige reads ‘Happiness is the Art of Being Broken’ by Bruce Dawe

Anthony Lawrence reads ‘The Simple Truth’ by Philip Levine

Claire G. Coleman reads ‘The Second Coming’ by W.B. Yeats 

Warwick Hadfield reads ‘Bouncer’ by Anthony Lawrence + ‘A Gypsy Tune’ by Gwen Harwood

Sarah Day reads ‘Encounter’ by Czesław Miłosz

Chris Wallace-Crabbe reads ‘South Country’ by Kenneth Slessor

Kerryn Goldsworthy reads ‘Quarantine’ by Eavan Boland             

Philip Mead reads 'One Train May Hide Another' by Kenneth Koch

Kevin Brophy reads ‘Aware’ by Denise Levertov

Andrea Goldsmith reads ‘A Man in His Life’ by Yehuda Amichai (translation by Chana Bloch)

Michael Farrell reads ‘Andy’s Gone with Cattle’ by Henry Lawson            

Geoffrey Lehmann reads ‘At Half Past Three, A Single Bird’ by Emily Dickinson

Maria Takolander reads ‘Brooms’ by Charles Simic

Ali Alizadeh reads ‘The Walls Do Not Fall’ by HD (Hilda Doolittle)

Thom Sullivan reads ‘The City Limits’ by A.R. Ammons     

The ABR Podcast is released every Wednesday and features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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In his first article for ABR, 'Notes on a Pandemic', Behrouz Boochani Fellow 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.

The ABR Podcast is released every Wednesday and features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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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.

The ABR Podcast is released every Wednesday and features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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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. 

The ABR Podcast is released every Wednesday and features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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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.

All speakers and poems read are listed below in the order they appear.

Stephanie Trigg – 'Dialogue'

Stephan Edgar – 'Mid-Channel'

Greg Kratzmann – 'At Mornington'

Larry Sitsky – 'New Music'

Morag Fraser – 'Sea Eagle'

Peter Rose – 'The Twins'

Sarah Holland-Batt – 'Carnal Knowledge I'

Paul Kane – 'The Sick Philosopher'

Ann-Marie Priest – 'Night Flight'

Beate Josephi – 'At the Arts Club'

Kerryn Goldsworthy – 'The Wound'

Alison Hoddinott – 'Fido’s Paw Is Bleeding'

Andrew Taylor – 'Mother Who Gave Me Life'

John Hawke – 'Toward Bruny'

Margaret Robson Kett – 'O Could One Write As One Makes Love'

Craig Powell – 'The Past and Present'

Robyn Archer – 'Suburban Sonnet'

The ABR Podcast is released every Wednesday and features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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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 issue of ABR.

The ABR Podcast is released every Wednesday and features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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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 her experience of her mother's death during the coronavirus pandemic, and how to find the space to grieve when the world itself is shaken.

The ABR Podcast is released every Wednesday and features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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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.

The ABR Podcast is released every Wednesday and features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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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.

And a heads-up for entrants and short fiction lovers. Our upcoming August 2020 issue will include this year’s three shortlisted stories. Join us for a Jolley Prize Zoom ceremony on August 13, when the shortlisted authors will read their stories and the overall winner will be announced. Registration details will be released shortly.

The ABR Podcast is released every Wednesday and features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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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. 

The ABR Podcast is released every Wednesday and features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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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. 

The ABR Podcast is released every Wednesday and features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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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, Peter Porter: 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. Click here for more information.

As poets around the world hone their entries, here's an opportunity to listen to all previous winning poems of the Porter Prize, 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. Below we list the times that all poets appear.

1.26 | Stephen Edgar: 'Man on the Moon'

4.17 | Judith Bishop: 'Still Life with Cockles and Shells'

6.02 | Alex Skovron: 'Sanctum'

8.00 | Tracy Ryan: 'Lost Property' 

11.16 | Anthony Lawrence: 'Domestic Emergencies'

16.16 | Judith Bishop: 'Openings'

20.46 | Tony Lintermans: 'Self-portrait at Sixty'

23.06 | Michael Farrell: 'Beautiful Mother'

26.31 | John A. Scott: 'Four Sonnets'

32.46 | Jessica L. Wilkinson: 'Arrival Platform Humlet' 

35.27 | Judith Beveridge: 'As Wasps Fly Upwards'

39.52 | Amanda Joy: 'Tailings'

43.18 | Damen O'Brien: 'pH'

48.04 | Louis Klee: 'Sentence to Lilacs'

49.59 | Nicholas Wong: '101, Taipei'

53.14 | Andy Kissane: 'Searching the Dead'

57.34 | Belle Ling: '63 Temple Street, Mong Kok'

1.03.06 | A. Frances Johnson: 'My Father's Thesaurus'

The ABR Podcast is released every Wednesday and features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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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 some regard him as a huckster, vacuous and inflated. He perfected a kind of cynical celebrity: the denizen of Studio 54, the consort of Lee Radziwill and all. Fame for Warhol became a kind of world-weary obsession. 

In today's episode, Paul McDermott – comedian, writer, and occasional painter – examines this contradictory artist, who is the subject of a new biography written by Blake Gopnik.

The ABR Podcast is released every Wednesday and features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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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. 

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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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.

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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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 sombrely might add the current pandemic. 

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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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.

Order of poets

Claire G. Coleman | 'I Am the Road'

Chris Wallace-Crabbe | ‘Cardomom Country’

Lisa Gorton | ‘Mirabilia’

David McCooey | ‘Notes on 2001: A Space Odyssey’

Gig Ryan | ‘Simaetha’

Peter Rose | ‘Cicerone’

Jordie Albiston | ‘Iceberg’

Michael Farrell | ‘Greta and the Cream’

Bella Li | ‘Interior of the Garden’

A. Frances Johnson | ‘Magdalene’

Alex Skovron | ‘The Violin-maker, the Forest and the Clock’

Jessica Wilkinson | 'Haeiff Divertimento'

Barry Hill | 'Kind Fire'

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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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.

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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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 his 2004 work Cloud Atlas, a work of sprawling interconnected narratives. In a similar vein, Utopia Avenue traces the intricate lives of four band members during their ascent to fame during the bustle of the 1960s. Yet as James Bradley details, the book is less concerned with history or music then with its own 'metaphysical game'. 

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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In today's episode, C.J. Garrow reads his short story 'Egg Timer', which placed second in this year's ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Mykaela Saunders was placed first for 'River Story', which you can also listen to here. 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. 'Egg Timer', his first piece of published fiction, explores pandemical times through the eyes of a child.

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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In today's episode, Jack Callil speaks to ABR Patron's Fellow Felicity Plunkett about Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet and her final instalment, Summer. As Plunkett writes in her October issue review, 'Smith's quartet is a work of splitting and mending, repair instead of despair.'

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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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 ‘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.

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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In today's episode, Johanna Leggatt speaks to ABR Editor Peter Rose about growing disquiet about ‘cancel culture’, censorious voices on social media, and Twitter's threat to 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’. This interview is based on her recent article, 'The Problem of Belonging'.

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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

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?’

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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

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 regionalism. As he writes in his upcoming 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’s article ‘Thinking in a regional accent’ is one of a series of commentaries funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. It appears in the November issue.

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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

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.

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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

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.

Joshua Black's article ‘After the Waves’ is one of a series of commentaries funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. It appears in the November issue.

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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

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'.

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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

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.

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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

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. 

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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

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.

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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

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’.

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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

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.

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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

The Peter Porter Poetry Prize, now in its seventeenth year and worth a total of $10,000, this year attracted more than 1300 entries from 33 different countries. It’s our pleasure now to present the five shortlisted poets, who 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 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (an access link for the event will be sent to you via email closer to the date).

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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

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.'

Samuel Watts’s article ‘This Is America’ is one of a series of commentaries funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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

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

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

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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

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’.

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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

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.

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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

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. 

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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

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 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.

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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

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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.

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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

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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.

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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

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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.

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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

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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.

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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

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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.

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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

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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.' 

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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

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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’.

The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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

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

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

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

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

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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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 for troubled times’, 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:

1. Sarah Holland-Batt – Adam Zagajewski, ‘Try to Praise the Mutilated World’ (1:25)
2. Anders Villani – Jamaal May, ‘There Are Birds Here’ (3:32) and Tomas Tranströmer ‘Kyrie’ (5:47)
3. Felicity Plunkett – Tracy K. Smith, ‘An Old Story’ (7:01)
4. 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)
5. Jenny Harrison – Eavan Boland, ‘Lullaby’ (13:39)
6. Peter Goldsworthy – Eugenio Montale, ‘Forse un mattino’ (15:31)
7. Caitlin Maling – Theodore Roethke, ‘The Waking’ (16:41)
8. Judith Bishop – Tomas Tranströmer, ‘Face to Face’ (19:14)
9. Thuy On – Thuy On, ‘Beautiful Mess’ (21:03)
10. John Kinsella – Emily Brontë, ‘No Coward Soul is Mine’ (22:09)
    
    

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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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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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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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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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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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The Nachgeborenen, Elisabeth Holdsworth second from left, Fritz front centre (photograph courtesy of Elisabeth Holdsworth)

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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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, 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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‘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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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‍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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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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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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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 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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The late Gillian Mears’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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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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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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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.’

All poets are timestamped below in the audio player.

Join us to announce the winner

RSVP for an online ceremony at 6pm on January 19 as we reveal the winner of the 2022 Porter Prize. The night will feature the shortlisted poets introducing and reading their poems before a special guest announces the overall winner.

Simply email your interest to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to attend the ceremony. We will send you a Zoom link closer to the event.

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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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‘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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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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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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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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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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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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