Episode 9 of Australian Shorts features Alex Cothren. Alex is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Flinders University. He is a winner of the Carmel Bird, William van Dyke, Griffith Review Emerging Voices and Peter Carey Awards for short fiction. His satirical story collection, Playing Nice Was Getting Me Nowhere, was published in 2025 by Pink Shorts Press. Alex lives and works on the traditional lands of the Kaurna people.

In this episode, Alex reads The Juansons from his collection and explains why this story took five years to write and how it went from a 30,000-word polished novella to a 3000-word short story. Alex also explains the purpose and potential dangers of satire and reminds us that the harder things are to do in art, the better our art usually ends up.

 This episode was recorded on the lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal people of Magandjin (Brisbane) and on the traditional lands of the Kaurna people (Adelaide). 

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Australian Shorts, a podcast about short stories written by Australian authors, is produced by Karen Hollands