This week on The ABR Podcast, we feature ‘Backflip’ by New Zealand author 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 town in the grip of a traumatic disturbance’.

Sam Keenan lives in Aotearoa, New Zealand. She won the inaugural Sargeson Prize in 2019 and came second in the Sunday Star-Times short story competition in 2017. Her short stories have been published in Landfall, Sunday Star-Times, and the anthology Middle Distance (2021). Her work often focuses on the social history of Aotearoa.

‘Backflip’ by Sam Keenan is published in the August issue of ABR.