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 (http://www.australianbookreview.com.au)
‘To kill the pig: Politics that misses the moment’ by Emma Dawson
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. Here is Emma Dawson with ‘To kill the pig: Politics that misses the moment’, published in the October issue of ABR.
30 Sept 2026
‘Fierce ground: Laying down songline’ by Cheryl Leavy
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. Here is Cheryl Leavy with ‘Fierce ground: Laying down songline’, published in the September issue of ABR.
23 Sept 2026
‘“He lives eternally who lives in the present”: On lost sonnets and wandering through paradise with Gwen Harwood’ by Peter Goldsworthy
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.
Who has been a guest on The ABR Podcast
Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.
Shan Windscript
Rebecca Strating
André Dao
Natasha Sholl
Peter Rose
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
2 ratings
Spotify
4.9 / 5
7 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 52 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
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