The Readings Podcast

In this episode, a conversation with Miriam Sved, author of a new novel, Illuminated Ruins.

For Uri and Lujza Weiss, life in the British colony of Hong Kong is a tailored mask. The two are Hungarian Jewish doctors who escaped the wreckage of Europe in the 1930s only to endure Japanese occupation – but they have rebuilt themselves through a fragile, assimilated restraint.

The arrival of the Mackay’s upends this peace. Hugh is a charismatic American with shadowy connections and Nancy is his effortlessly poised wife. As the families entwine, their daughters – Millie and Anne – form a bond so intense it threatens to consume them. While the adults navigate the social rituals of the colony, the children retreat to the island’s illuminated ruins. Playing among bombed-out shells and wartime bunkers, they mirror a world of missions and cover stories. But when Anne reveals a truth Millie’s parents have kept unspoken for a decade, the foundations of their universe fracture.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781761154959/illuminated-ruins--miriam-sved--2026--9781761154959

In this special episode, we're delighted to share a conversation with Olivia De Zilva, whose novel, Plastic Budgie, has been named the winner of the 2026 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction.

The Readings Prize has been celebrating outstanding new Australian writing since The New Australian Fiction Prize was first awarded in 2014. We’re incredibly proud of the impact we’ve had as champions of emerging authors in that time.

Published by independent publisher Pink Shorts Press, Plastic Budgie is a wonderfully inventive, often hilarious, and surprisingly moving exploration of family, identity, memory and growing up.

At the centre of the book is a character named Olivia, whose life unfolds through a series of episodes, recollections and encounters. We follow her from childhood in Adelaide, through the awkwardness and embarrassments of adolescence, to university and beyond. Along the way, we meet her parents, her Cantonese grandparents, her teachers and friends, and a whole cast of characters whose influence on her life is sometimes profound, sometimes ridiculous, and often both.

But Plastic Budgie is much more than a conventional coming-of-age story. Blurring the boundaries between fiction and autobiography, Olivia De Zilva plays with the ways we remember our lives, the stories we tell about ourselves, and the sometimes strange relationship between who we are and who we imagine ourselves to be.

It's a book full of wonderfully specific details, from early-2000s popular culture to family superstitions and the peculiar logic of childhood. And while there's plenty of humour, there's also a great deal of tenderness in the way De Zilva writes about family, cultural inheritance, and the complicated business of finding a place for ourselves in the world.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781763554146/plastic-budgie--olivia-de-zilva--2025--9781763554146

In this episode, a recording taken from the launch of poet Andy Jackson’s new collection, Askew. Jackson was joined by three other poets – Tim Loveday, Angela Costi and Rachael Wenona Guy – to read selections from Askew, and to present one of their own works, too.

Following his acclaimed exploration of disability and deformity in Human Looking, the poems in Andy Jackson’s new collection widen the lens, to feel their way into the impairments of our ecologies and our dialogues. How might our world itself be disabled? How can we live together within this reality?

These poems use an array of established and invented forms – sonnet, pantoum, erasure, prose poem, ghazal, cento and more – turning them to unusual effect under the pressure of our collective grief and bewilderment. They face the extinction and climate crises, the distortions of social media division, the fracturing of solidarity in the wake of the Covid pandemic, and the problems of masculinity with undaunted tenderness. They express, with an extraordinary intensity, the sense of vulnerability, both as human, and as poetic value.

Engaging in aslant conversation with musicians and composers, poets and artists, while reckoning with historical and contemporary thinkers, this is poetry that affirms the value of collaboration and interdependence, with all of its promise and difficulty.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781923106772/askew--andy-jackson--2026--9781923106772

In this episode, a conversation with historian and award-winning author Sally Young, who has a new book that delves into late-nineteenth century Melbourne and Australia’s most infamous political crime, The Curious Case of the Stolen Mace. 


In 1891, the sacred symbol of the Victorian Parliament, its ceremonial mace, was stolen. A long, heavy club topped with a crown, it was popularly thought to be made of solid gold. The colony’s best detectives, a dour Scot named Tom Nixon and the famous Ned Kelly hunter Mick Ward, were assigned to the case, but the mace was never recovered. No one was ever charged, and a substantial reward remains unclaimed. Was the thief a corrupt politician who took the mace to a brothel on a drunken lark? A parliamentary worker who was seen with an odd-shaped package? A carpenter who snuck in through an open window? Or a political activist?

This book pieces together old and new evidence 135 years later – including letters, witness statements and police reports – to reveal the thief and how he got away with the political crime of the century, just as Melbourne was sinking into economic chaos caused by theft on a much grander scale.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781761170850/the-curious-case-of-the-stolen-mace--sally-young--2026--9781761170850

In this episode, a recording taken from the launch of Christopher Raja’s new novel, Eye of the Needle, where Raja was joined in conversation by fellow novelist, Raeden Richardson.

In 1882 a young Afghan named Kadir lands in Port Augusta. He has arrived with six camels to make his fortune, and so becomes the transport for a scientific expedition into the red centre.

More than a century later a young man named Kris comes of age in the Melbourne suburbs, having emigrated from India with his family when he was just a boy. After the trauma of his father’s mysterious death, Kris gravitates to St Kilda in search of a bigger world.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781921758614/eye-of-the-needle--christopher-raja--2026--9781921758614

In this episode, a conversation with David McKay, a literary translator. McKay has produced the newly published English-language version of Dutch author Anjet Daanje’s The Song of Stork and Dromedary, a masterful, multi-award-winning book inspired by the life and work of Emily Brontë – acclaimed as the best Dutch novel published this century.

In the early 1800s, in Yorkshire, Eliza May Drayden and her sisters live far from the public eye, devoted to their shared love of reading and writing books. When, after dozens of rejections, Eliza May’s only novel, Haeger Mass, is finally published, it’s labelled as ‘ghastly’ and ‘immoral’. Over time, however, it is embraced by generations of readers as a masterpiece, and tales about its mysterious, reclusive author take on a life of their own.

In eleven extraordinary chapters, the story of Eliza May – both before and after her death – unfolds: through the tales of people who met her; her sister’s letters; her biographers’ words; the pages of a mysterious notebook; and the lives that become intertwined with hers, even centuries later.

In The Song of Stork and Dromedary, Anjet Daanje has crafted an absorbing literary mystery and an unforgettable meditation on love, life, loss, and the inexplicable nature of time. As the Brontës themselves did, Daanje shows us that storytelling is our only way to transcend death.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781761380938/the-song-of-stork-and-dromedary--anjet-daanje--2026--9781761380938

In this episode, a conversation with Louise Kennedy, the prize-winning author of Trespasses, who returns with a new book, Stations, a devastating story of love and friendship, and a tender portrait of the choices we blithely make when we are young, unaware that the consequences will reverberate throughout our lives.

Róisín and Red meet as teenagers in their small Irish hometown in 1982. Brilliant, sharp-tongued and born to slip through the cracks, Red's reputation for trouble precedes him – but Róisín finds herself swept up in his storm, and soon their connection deepens. When a brush with the law pushes Red into a corner, he escapes their town to start a new life in England. As the years pass, they remain tethered to one another, a fragile thread holding their once fierce friendship together.

When Róisín arrives in London, the promise of freedom, of reinvention, and of finding her dear friend calls. But searching for Red leads Róisín to a truth darker than she could have imagined: when you go looking for someone you may uncover parts of yourself along the way that you'd rather stayed buried. And Red – bright, beautiful Red – might not want to be found at all.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781526664334/stations--louise-kennedy--2026--9781526664334

In this episode, a conversation with Bruce Pascoe, author of the ground-breaking book Dark Emu, and an Aboriginal farmer and writer of other works of literary fiction, poetry, essays and children’s literature. Pascoe has returned with a new work of non-fiction, The European Mind.

In this book, Pascoe synthesises history, memoir and philosophy, and identifies the persistence of the colonial power structures and thinking that European colonists brought to the world, and the hope for remedy that lies in remembering certain Indigenous ways of being.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781922864673/the-european-mind--bruce-pascoe--2026--9781922864673

In this episode, a conversation with Lara Pawson, author of Spent Light, a startling new hybrid book – fiction, memoir, history, essay – which grants us a perspective on the world with fresh eyes, and implores us to not look away.

An unnamed woman contemplates the toaster she’s inherited from a neighbour. A homely object, hardly worthy of a sonnet or still-life. And yet, thinking of where its parts originated, who assembled it, and how it arrived at her door, could it not be considered as a source of awe?

There is nothing else in contemporary writing quite like this quest to think through the common objects that make up a comfortable life. Pawson makes us see in them all the parameters of history, slavery, genocide, as well as the joy of work, care, physical pleasure – until we realise that this extraordinary book is also a love story.

Our female narrator’s unrelenting focus on the details of domestic living spirals into moments of dark humour. Pawson’s courageous thought associations allow us to, perhaps, apprehend the darkness and light in our shared humanity.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781923670112/spent-light--laura-pawson--2026--9781923670112

In today's episode, a conversation with Min Jin Lee, the acclaimed author of the major global bestseller Pachinko, who has returned with American Hagwon – a breathtaking contemporary epic that follows one family as they reckon with ambition and moderation, love and loyalty, personal dreams and familial duty. Min Jin Lee was joined in conversation by Raeden Richardson, to discuss this new book.

John and Helen Koh and their three children – Bo, DH and Mido – are building new lives in Korea when they find their worlds upended, first by a terrible betrayal and then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Striving to regain their footing, the Kohs set out to do whatever it takes to provide for their children’s futures. They leave Seoul for Sydney and eventually settle in California, where new opportunities open for the Koh children, as the parents, strangers in a strange land, adjust to a difficult existence in which their qualifications mean little. Their way forward is lit by the faith that education will lead the next generation to the success and security that have eluded their parents.

The Kohs, their friends, relatives and even their foes move in and out of each other’s lives as they navigate love, work, fortune and fulfilment across the years. But with each new sacrifice and fresh horizon, larger questions begin to open up before them: what are we willing to give up to secure the happiness of the ones we love? What is the purpose of education? And what is truly important for a good life?

The titular Hagwon refers to the private, for-profit educational institutes or cram schools in South Korea that provide additional classes outside of regular school hours – by now a near-mandatory extracurricular activity for many of the country’s youth. Building on this, in American Hagwon, Min Jin Lee has crafted a transcendent, panoramic novel of profound emotional richness, where the smallest of gestures can have enormous repercussions. This is the most ambitious and extraordinary work yet by one of our greatest novelists.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9780008823917/american-hagwon--min-jin-lee--2026--9780008823917