The Readings Podcast

In this episode, another instalment of the Readings Kids Podcast, hosted by Readings Prize and Readings Foundation coordinator Angela Crocombe. Angela was joined by members of the Teen Advisory Board for a discussion with Suzy Zail, author of A New Kind of Beautiful, a moving YA novel about love, loss, and the beauty in the things we can't always see. Paige Wilding has her future mapped out – the Year 10 Art prize. Graduation. A coveted spot in an elite art school in New York. But when she's diagnosed with an incurable eye disease, the perfect life she’s planned starts to blur. She makes a choice to keep her condition secret and live louder, love wilder, and paint like her life depends on it. Only her best friend Jazz knows the truth, and is helping her cram a lifetime of colour into a single year. But as her sight fades and she’s forced to give up painting, it’s Zac, her rival for the art prize, who helps Paige find a way back to her art and a new kind of beautiful; messy and imperfect but also raw, unfiltered and fiercely alive.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781760653743/a-new-kind-of-beautiful--suzy-zail--2026--9781760653743

In this episode, a recording taken from the Melbourne launch of Tom Griffiths’ new book, Alice’s dreaming, an astonishing work of history about a girl and the Indigenous world she encountered. Early last century, Alice Duncan-Kemp grew up on a remote Queensland cattle station. Later she would write down her childhood memories of learning from Aboriginal women and men at home on their own Country. In her books, she evoked a rich parallel universe of storytelling and lore, which she felt privileged to witness. She also spoke of an informal local treaty that curbed the violence of the frontier. What are we to make of 'Alice's dreaming' today? Master historian and writer Tom Griffiths takes us into – and beyond – this revelatory encounter. Through it we glimpse the turmoil of a complex and tragic frontier, and a remarkable story of survival and cultural resilience. In recent years, the Mithaka people Alice lived among and wrote about have reclaimed their Country, drawing in part on her writing to support their claims. Alice's dreaming shows how moving, intimate – and unexpected – history can be.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781760646240/alices-dreaming--tom-griffiths--2026--9781760646240

In this episode, a conversation with Amanda Curtin, author of a new novel – Six Days. Daniel, an expatriate Australian who has lived in Paris for more than forty years, has made a mess of his life and is trying to atone, to become the ‘good man’ his friend Marcelline believes him to be. But Marcelline has disappeared, the quotidian world has been tipped out of balance and Daniel makes an error of judgment that places at risk everything he values. The novel’s six-day narrative, set in the Latin Quarter of Paris in the winter of 2012, expands into lifetimes, histories, as interconnecting stories weave through Daniel’s. Stories of abandonment and fractured families, rape and coercion, addiction, ambition, loss and grief, are told in moments and set within the context of war and occupation, the revolutionary sixties, riots in a Catalan town in the south of France, a grassroots movement to make visible the invisible homeless. The personal stitched into, and inseparable from, the political. And throughout, the constant of footsteps and pawpatter as Daniel and his old dog walk the streets of one of the most idealised and romanticised cities on earth.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781764239745/six-days--amanda-curtin--2026--9781764239745

In this episode, another instalment of the Comics Question, where Bernard Caleo discusses comics, graphic novels, and the place they inhabit within the broader books and publishing world. Bernard was joined by Aki Fukuoka, children’s book illustrator and graphic novelist, who has worked on over 80 children’s books, most notably including Sally Rippin’s beloved Billie B Brown series. The two met to discuss the newest iteration in this series, a first graphic novel collaboration for Rippin and Fukuoka, and how, for Aki, this form of children’s illustration is inextricably linked to another illustrated storytelling tradition, that of Japanese comics, or Manga.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781761216404/spooky-house-volume-1--sally-rippin--2026--9781761216404

In this episode, a conversation with Lenny Robinson, author of And in the Morning, a prismatic gem of a debut novel that reflects the experiences of women across three wars and the damage done to the men they love. In the winter of 1919, Lily and her three-year-old son, Ted, rush through the streets of Melbourne to welcome home Lily’s husband, Bert, who has spent the last four years fighting with the Light Horse in the Middle East. Twenty-three years later, as the same city awaits a Japanese invasion, Frankie, a young servicewoman on a night’s leave, meets an airman, Ed, at a dance. Almost three decades on, as Melbourne convulses with anti-war protests, single mother Fran prepares a funeral for her only son, a young conscript killed in Vietnam. And in the Morning is a novel about war and the ways in which its tragedies, both great and small, transform the intimate lives of the mothers, wives and lovers who must live with its consequences.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9780702268847/and-in-the-morning--lenny-robinson--2026--9780702268847

In today's episode, a conversation with Simon Reynolds, acclaimed music writer and journalist, and author of a new book, Still in a Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers and the Reinvention of Rock, 1984-1994. Twenty years after his acclaimed postpunk best-seller, Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds tells the tale of what happened next: the underground explosion of noisepop, shoegaze, slacker rock and grunge that reverberated through the mid-Eighties into the early Nineties. Capturing the musical exhilaration of the era along with the alienation of youth during a period of ascendant conservative politics and glitzy mainstream pop, Still in a Dream celebrates a golden age of guitar reinvention, a second psychedelia of mind-blowing sounds pioneered by bands like My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth. In Britain, groups like Cocteau Twins and Slowdive escaped into shimmering dreamworlds while American underground rockers like Dinosaur Jr. and Pavement blended apathy and urgency into thrilling noise. A propulsive and personal account from a journalist who covered this music in real time from the frontlines, Still in a Dream vividly recreates a period that was the last blast for the analogue culture of vinyl records and music papers, before the Internet changed everything.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781399618373/still-in-a-dream--simon-reynolds--2026--9781399618373

In this episode, a conversation recorded at the Melbourne launch of Jordan Prosser’s new work of fiction/sci-fi, Blue Giant, an unruly eulogy for millennial optimism – and a deranged love letter to a generation torn between helplessness and selfishness. Abby always believed she was destined for great things. But her dream career as an industry-disrupting fashion designer went up in smoke, and her aspirations to become a world-renowned yogi and/or save the endangered tigers proved equally fruitless. She’s in her early thirties, suffering the unbearable burdens of adulthood and anonymity, when she wakes up after a drunken bender with an all-new, all-consuming purpose in life: to be the first person on Mars. Perfect timing – Danish tech entrepreneur Tor Skovgaard is currently recruiting for a one-way mission to colonise the red planet. Abby knows this is it: her last-ditch bid for fame and glory. And if she can’t be humanity’s saviour … she’ll settle for being its martyr.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9780702269240/blue-giant--jordan-prosser--2026--9780702269240

In this episode, a conversation with Avigayl Sharp, author of a blisteringly funny and transcendently deranged debut novel for fans of Ottessa Moshfegh, Patricia Lockwood and George Saunders. In Offseason, our fiercely observant but self-deluded narrator finds herself teaching at an all-girls boarding school in a remote coastal town. In between manic lectures that veer from Charles Dickens's Bleak House to the childhood maltreatment of her beloved Iosif Stalin and the generational legacy of the Holocaust, she implicates everyone she meets in her quest to pin down where exactly her own life went wrong. Avigayl Sharp was interviewed by author Raeden Richardson, to discuss this new book, process and craft, and the role of the novel in contemporary consciousness and culture.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781399637015/offseason--avigayl-sharp--2026--9781399637015

In this episode, a conversation with Mirandi Riwoe, the award-winning, bestselling author of Stone Sky Gold Mountain, and of a new book, the story of an Irish-Chinese family over four generations in Australia, A Short History of Longans. It’s the winter of 2049 and Daniel is elderly and long isolated. Soon after yet another devastating storm, this time destroying his beloved longan tree, he finds his fragile peace threatened by a growing friendship with a widowed neighbour and the appearance of a young reporter digging into a shameful event buried deep in his past. As the novel moves back to autumn 2000 and then to summer 1949 and finally to the spring of the mid-nineteenth century, Daniel's family's history unspools, until we meet a Chinese bushranger, Ah Yang. Intriguing and beautifully written, this dazzling novel unravels the secrets and memories of an Irish-Chinese family to explore what it means to belong to place, to ancestors, to ourselves – spanning centuries and generations.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9780702269004/a-short-history-of-longans--mirandi-riwoe--2026--9780702269004

In this episode, another instalment of the Comics Question, where Bernard Caleo discusses comics, graphic novels, and the place they inhabit within the broader books and publishing world. Bernard was joined by Trace Balla, a much-loved Australian children's book writer, illustrator, and author of an extraordinary, inspiring and hope-filled graphic novel, Treeshape. This beautiful book tells the story of young Trace's awakening to the preciousness of the environment, including her participation in the protests against uranium mining at Jabiluka in the 1980s. Channelling her gift for visual storytelling, Trace reveals emotional truths, shares her commitment to environmental activism, highlights trees that have been meaningful in her life, and explores her deep appreciation of place and connection with First Nations peoples.

Enjoyed what you heard? Click here to purchase the book: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781761181252/treeshape--trace-balla--2026--9781761181252