AustLit

'Welcome back to the ABR Podcast. We begin 2024 with the Peter Porter Poetry Prize. First presented in 2005, the Porter Prize is one of the world’s leading competitions for a new poem in English. It is worth a total of $10,000, of which the overall winner will receive $6,000. This episode of the ABR Podcast features the five shortlisted poets reading from their work, with introductions from ABR Editor Peter Rose. The winning poem will be announced at an online ceremony on 23 January 2024.' (Production summary)

'This week’s ABR Podcast features Kevin Foster’s straight-shooting review of whistleblower David McBride’s memoir The Nature of Honour, which begins: ‘Sometimes, for the faithful, it doesn’t do to look too closely into the life of your chosen idol.’ Foster’s books include Don’t Mention the War: The Australian Defence Force, the media and the Afghan conflict (2013). One of his current research projects – about social media and the military – is funded by the Australian Army Research Centre. ‘The lives of the saints:' (Production summary)

'In this week’s ABR Podcast, historian Ebony Nilsson tracks the lives of mid-century migrant Australians with the aid of ASIO and CIA files. Ebony Nilsson is a Research Fellow at the Australian Catholic University, the current ABR Laureate Fellow, and recently published her first book, Displaced Comrades: Politics and Surveillance in the Lives of Soviet Refugees in the West. Listen to ‘The lives of ‘ordinary’ people: From Siberia and Shanghai to Kings Cross’, published in the January-February issue of ABR.' (Production summary)

'This week on the ABR Podcast we look at Qantas with business writer and historian Stuart Kells. In his review of Alan Joyce and Qantas: The trials and transformation of an Australian icon by Peter Harbison, Kells notes that the company’s declining reputation extends beyond the area of substandard customer service. Stuart Kells is Adjunct Professor at La Trobe Business School and has twice won the Ashurst Business Literature Prize. Listen to ‘Fasten your seatbelts: Turbulent times at Alan Joyce’s Qantas’, published in the January-February issue of ABR.' (Production summary)

'In this week’s episode of the ABR Podcast we revisit Cate Kennedy’s short story ‘Sleepers’, which won second prize in the 2010 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. ‘Sleepers’ was also included in Kennedy’s 2012 short-story collection Like a House on Fire. Cate Kennedy is an award-winning writer of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Listen to Cate Kennedy’s ‘Sleepers’.' (Production summary)

'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’.' (Introduction)

'Frank Moorhouse: Strange paths has no introduction, but Matthew Lamb describes it in his author’s note as ‘the first in a projected two-volume cultural biography of Frank Moorhouse’, covering the long writing apprenticeship of 1938–74 during which Moorhouse ‘br[oke] into the literary establishment, on his own terms’. Lamb does not explain his use of the term ‘cultural biography’ within the book, but the term is apt to describe how ‘biography intersects with social history’ as the book tracks Moorhouse’s ‘negotiation of shifting social conventions and historical moments’ (as Lamb puts it in an article on the Penguin website titled ‘“When the facts conflict with the legend”  – How does a biographer balance storytelling with the truth?’).' (Introduction)