‘“May today sink peace into your soul”: New scams in the literary world’ by Dennis Altman

This week, on The ABR Podcast, we feature a special commentary by Dennis Altman on the new literary scams enabled by artificial intelligence. Altman recounts the multiple emails he has received from people ‘whose lives will not be complete if they are not given the opportunity to promote one of my …

‘Urgent compassion: Paying courageous attention’ by Felicity Plunkett

This week, on The ABR Podcast, Felicity Plunkett reviews Fear Less: Poetry in perilous times, by former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. In a cultural moment when language is often ‘weaponised to cultivate division and fear’, Smith proposes a more audacious alternative: to live otherwise, refusing …

‘“Suppose I am wrong?”: On writers’ festivals, reassurance, calibration, and risk’ by Simon Tedeschi

This week on The ABR Podcast, we feature a special commentary by Simon Tedeschi on writers’ festivals. At the level below headlines, writers’ festivals have in recent years undergone a more subtle but pernicious shift, he argues. Whereas they were once sites of complex dialogue and genuine exchange…

‘Thinking in public: The vulpine poetry of Chris Wallace-Crabbe’ by Eleanor Spencer-Regan

This week, on The ABR Podcast, Eleanor Spencer-Regan reflects on Melbourne poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s poetic career. Wallace-Crabbe made the poem ‘a space for thinking in public’, she writes. In his work, poetry is treated ‘less as statement than as real-time event: a site in which ideas are tried…

'Roads to roads: Bathos of the ordinary' by Grace Roodenrys

This week on The ABR Podcast, Grace Roodenrys reviews they, a novel by Danish author Helle Helle. ‘The novel is a story of illness and loss but often reads as anything but,’ Roodenrys writes. There is no predominant meaning imposed on the narrative; much of its ontological poignancy stems from its …

'Lemmings over a cliff: On political and publishing expediency' by Joel Deane

This week on The ABR Podcast, Joel Deane reviews Niki Savva’s Earthquake, an account of the 2025 Australian federal election and the role of political expediency in shaping a country. ‘Like payday loans,’ Deane writes, ‘the costs of short-term political decisions accumulate and compound’, demanding…

‘When universities mattered: Higher education in a country addicted to the plough’ by Stephen Garton

This week on The ABR Podcast, we feature Stephen Garton’s commentary ‘When universities mattered: Higher education in a country addicted to the plough’. ‘There was a time when Australian universities mattered. Should they again?’ asks President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and former…

‘Thought’s tempo: Essays that imagine otherwise’ by Mindy Gill

This week, on The ABR Podcast, Mindy Gill reviews Dead and Alive, Zadie Smith’s latest essay collection. For Gill, Smith’s essays ‘have an uncanny habit of arriving precisely when the culture shifts’. Dead and Alive ranges across technology and digital surveillance, authorship and literature, and t…

‘A truly probabilistic universe: One hundred years of heated debate and mind-bending physics’ by Sara Webb

This week on The ABR Podcast, Sara Webb investigates the heated debates and mind bending science of quantum physics. As Webb writes, the ‘universe exists on an unimaginable scale’, its physics strange but wondrous. Sara Webb is the inaugural ABR Science Fellow and an astrophysicist at Swinburne Un…

‘Less an author than a milieu: Reading Shakespeare in the New World’ by Stuart Kells

This week, on The ABR Podcast, we feature a special essay by Stuart Kells, titled ‘Less an author than a milieu: Reading Shakespeare in the New World’. Kells discusses the thorny question of the authorship of the First Folio. While some devoted Shakespeareans insist that the First Folio was authore…