September 2025, no. 479
In the September issue, Zoe Holman writes on life in Iran after the recent twelve-day war, asking whether conflict brought Iranians closer to democracy or further away from it. On its seventieth anniversary, Nathan Hollier looks at the first global conference of postcolonial Asian and African nations, held in the Indonesian city of Bandung in 1955, and Australia’s telling role in it. Kylie Moore-Gilbert finds hope for Israel in her review of The Holy and the Broken by Ittay Flescher. We publish Andra Putnis’s essay ‘The Art and Atrocity of Disaster Scenarios’, highly commended in this year’s Calibre Prize, and there are reviews by Mark McKenna on Jimmy Governor, Ramona Koval on Elizabeth Harrower, and Martin Thomas on Patrick White. Elsewhere, Victoria Grieves Williams examines the ‘trouble of colour’ in family history, Emma Dawson reviews a history of work hours, and former MP Kim Carr asks whether universities are in crisis. We review novels by Han Kang, Patricia Lockwood, Alex Cothren, Sinéad Stubbins, and Tony Tulathimutte, publish poems by Pulitzer prize-winning poet Carl Phillips, Chris Andrews, and Munira Tabassum Ahmed, and interview Brandl & Shlesinger publisher Veronica Sumegi.
September’s cover artwork is by Alice Lindstrom.