The ABR Podcast

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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