Podcast
The ABR Podcast
Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.
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‘Limerence’
by Rachael Wenona Guy
This week on The ABR Podcast we feature Rachael Wenona Guy’s short story ‘Limerence’, which placed third in the 2025 Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. ‘Limerence’ deftly interweaves artifice and realism, narrative ellipses and unsettling meditation to create an uncanny confession. It stages a teenage girl’s obsession around the image of the dead young explorer and sailor John Torrington and life in a conservative town in an island state. The staging is paced, powerful, and evocative. That this death obsession makes life almost bearable for the girl marks the trysts and autopsies of social alienation and colonial legacies.
Rachael Wenona Guy creates writing, visual art, and performance. Her writing has appeared in numerous Australian and international journals and anthologies including Overland, Sleepers Almanac, Australian Poetry Journal, Australian Poetry Anthology, and most recently Raging Grace, an anthology of collaborative writing on disability. Walleah Press published her début poetry collection, The Hungry Air, in 2020. She is currently working on a new collection of experimental poetic memoir to be published in 2026. Here is ‘Limerence’, by Rachael Wenona Guy, published in the August issue of ABR.
Recent episodes:
This week on The ABR Podcast we feature Rachael Wenona Guy’s short story ‘Limerence’, which placed third in the 2025 Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. ‘Limerence’ deftly interweaves artifice and realism, narrative ellipses and unsettling meditation to create an uncanny confession.
... (read more)
This week, on The ABR Podcast, we feature Kate Fullagar’s essay ‘Questions for Mai: Joshua Reynolds’s portrait and the memory of Empire’. Fullagar delves into the history behind Joshua Reynold’s famous portrait of Mai, the first Pacific Islander to visit Britain.
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This week, on The ABR Podcast, Judith Bishop reviews Empire of AI: Inside the reckless race for total domination by Karen Hao and The AI Con: How to fight Big Tech’s hype and create the future we want by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna. Bishop seeks to cut through what she sees as prevailing ‘AI doomer/boomer ideologies’, where artificial intelligence is something that will either save us, or kill us.
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This week on The ABR Podcast we feature Tracey Slaughter’s short story ‘Sediment’, which placed second in the 2025 Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. ‘Sediment’ takes the form of twenty-seven brilliant points about living and loving in a female share house. It encompasses intense casual relationships and snarks at a landlord and his rotten portfolio.
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This week, on The ABR Podcast, we feature Sean Scalmer’s commentary ‘Albanese’s “Australian Way”: The rise of “progressive patriotism” and its complex past’. Scalmer investigates Albanese’s definition of the ‘Australian Way’, which ‘served as a touchstone on the campaign trail’, and asks what this ethos represents for the Labor government, particularly in the context of Australia’s complex history of labour reform.
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This week, on The ABR Podcast, we feature ‘Deeper into darkness: Iran after the twelve-day war’. Australian journalist Zoe Holman writes on life in Iran after the recent twelve-day war, investigating whether conflict brought Iranians closer to democracy or further away from it.
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This week, on The ABR Podcast, we feature Nathan Hollier’s commentary ‘“Come nearer to Asia”: Australia’s place at Bandung, 1955.’ Seventy years after the 1955 Asian-African Conference, Hollier reflects on Australia’s official absence from this historic ‘postcolonial moment’, as well as its unofficial presence.
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This week on The ABR Podcast we feature Tara Sharman’s short story ‘Shelling’, which won the 2025 Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. In ‘Shelling’, we meet a woman in flight, driving with the corpse of her dead father stowed in the boot of her car.
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This week on the ABR Podcast, Lynda Ng reviews To Save and To Destroy: Writing as an Other by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Nguyen, who arrived in the United States from Vietnam as a child refugee in 1975, is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer. To Save and To Destroy is a collection of pieces Nguyen delivered for the prestigious Norton Lectures.
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This week on the ABR Podcast, Marilyn Lake reviews After America: Australia and the new world order by Emma Shortis and Hard New World: Our post-American future (Quarterly Essay 98) by Hugh White. Lake observes that both ‘authors argue that it is time to imagine a post-American world’ and emphasise ‘the necessity of retrieving our relationship with China’.
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