The ABR Podcast The ABR Podcast
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- Society & Culture
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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. Subscribe on iTunes, Google, or Spotify Podcasts, or whichever app you use to listen to your favourite podcasts.
For more information about ABR, visit our website, www.australianbookreview.com.au
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Gregory Day 'The Neighbour's Beans'
In this week’s ABR podcast we feature one of the winners of the 2011 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Gregory Day’s ‘The Neighbour’s Beans’ was joint winner of the prize that year with Carrie Tiffany’s ‘Before He Left the Family’. Gregory Day commented at the time that ‘the short story form encourages an intense display of the writer’s craft whilst being a potent vehicle for the compression of emotion’. Gregory Day is a novelist, poet, and composer from the Eastern Otways region of southwest Victoria. Listen to Gregory Day’s ‘The Neighbour’s Beans’, published in the October 2011 issue of ABR.
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Frank Bongiorno on how the Albanese government is travelling
In this week’s ABR Podcast, Frank Bongiorno assesses the Albanese government, which has recently completed the first half of its first term in office. Frank Bongiorno is Professor of History at the Australian National University, President of the Australian Historical Association, and the author of books including Dreamers and Schemers: A political history of Australia. Listen to Frank Bongiorno’s ‘‘‘Thin labourism” How is the Albanese government travelling?’, published in the April issue of ABR.
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Sascha Morrell reviews 'Frank Moorhouse: Strange paths' by Mathew Lamb
In this week’s ABR Podcast Sascha Morrell reviews Matthew Lamb’s biography, Frank Moorhouse: Strange paths. Mathew Lamb might be the ideal reader for Moorhouse’s archive and seems to match Moorhouse’s capacity for telling the truth ‘bit by bit’, wink by nudge. Sascha Morrell is a regular ABR contributor and a Lecturer in Literary Studies at Monash University. Listen to Sascha Morrell’s ‘When I am famous’: A masterpiece of biographical synthesis’, published in the April issue of ABR.
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'The Great Red Whale', an essay by Michael Winkler
On this week’s ABR Podcast, we return to the winner of the 2016 Calibre Essay Prize, Michael Winkler’s ‘The Great Red Whale’. As ABR remarked at the time, ‘This excoriating yet remarkably subtle meditation is also a tribute to consolations: landscape, specifically the desert of Central Australia, and literature, notably Moby-Dick.’ Here is Michael Winkler with ‘The Great Red Whale’.
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Scott Stephens reviews Kevin Hart's book on contemplation
This week on the ABR Podcast we consider a poetics of contemplation with Scott Stephens. In his review of Kevin Hart’s book on reading and thinking, Lands of Likeness, Stephens writes, ‘there is no desire to consume the object of contemplation; what there is, is a longing to understand’. Scott Stephens is the ABC’s Religion & Ethics online editor and the co-host, with Waleed Aly, of The Minefield on ABC Radio National. Listen to Scott Stephens’ ‘Nothing but kestrel: Kevin Hart’s invitation to read contemplatively’, published in the March issue of ABR.
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Pramoedya Ananta Toer and the Buru Quartet by Nathan Hollier
This week on the ABR Podcast we tell the story behind Indonesia’s twentieth-century literary masterpiece, the Buru Quartet, a set of novels that began life in a jail cell. The Buru novels were written by Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer, widely considered a potential winner of the Nobel Prize. Nathan Hollier, publisher at Australian National University Press, explains why the Buru novels hold special significance for Australia, even though, as he writes ‘few Australians have heard of them’. Here is Nathan Hollier with ‘”At least I’ve told these stories to you”: Pramoedya Ananta Toer and the Buru Quartet’, published in the March issue of ABR.
Customer Reviews
Poems For Troubled Times
This podcast was the best of it’s kind that I have heard in the past month. I especially liked the format of a wide variety of poets selecting one of their favorite poems. I loved being brought into the world of these memorable poems by the poets reading of them. I’ll listen to this one many times over.