HeyJaredThe ABR Podcast
Welcome to The ABR Podcast, produced by Australian Book Review. Released every Thursday, The ABR Podcast features a range of literary highlights, such as reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 9
- Latest publication
- Sep 3, 2026
- Audience
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 5, 2026
Latest episodes
‘Peach’ by Ursula Brunetti (opens the original)
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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
‘“What I wanted to signal”: Women navigating the media’ by Virginia Haussegger (opens the original)
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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 associat
‘Backflip’ by Sam Keenan (opens the original)
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This week on The ABR Podcast, we feature ‘Backflip’ by New Zealand writer 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
‘Literary critic as democratic role model’ by Varun Ghosh (opens the original)
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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
‘C.Q.D.’ by Laura Elvery (opens the original)
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This week on The ABR Podcast, we feature the winner of the 2026 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, ‘C.Q.D.’ by Laura Elvery. The young narrator of ‘C.Q.D.’ is on board the Carpathia in the year 1912. The ship is racing towards the Titanic after hearing its distress signal. Will it reach the Titanic in time? This year’s Jolley judges called ‘C.Q.D.’ an ‘iceberg of a story: it carries its heft below the surface’. An irreverent mix of melodrama, time travel, and pop culture, Elvery’s story als
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