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Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.
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Episode #186
In this week’s ABR Podcast, Scott Stephens reviews a book by Anne Manne: Crimes of the Crimes of the Cross: The Anglican paedophile network of Newcastle, its protectors and the man who fought for justice. Why is narcissism a central theme for a book about child sexual abuse? Stephens writes: ‘without the capacity or willingness to be attentive to the humanity of another person’, unfathomable cruelty becomes possible. Scott Stephens is the ABC’s Religion & Ethics online editor and the co-host, with Waleed Aly, of The Minefield on ABC Radio National. Listen to Scott Stephens’s ‘Soul blindness: Clerical narcissism and unfathomable cruelty’, published in the May issue of ABR.
Catriona Menzies-Pike is a writer and editor based in Vancouver. In 2023, she won the Walkley-Pascall Prize for arts criticism. Between 2015 and 2023, she was Editor of the Sydney Review of Books.
... (read more)In this week’s ABR Podcast, Catriona Menzies-Pike reviews Richard Flanagan’s new hybrid work Question 7. Menzies-Pike argues that Flanagan’s ‘sweeping engagement with history ultimately brings the author back to himself’ in ways that limit understanding of the present tense. Catriona Menzies-Pike is a literary critic and former editor of the Sydney Review of Books. Listen to ‘The Measure of things: Flanagan’s looping book of questions’, published in the November issue of ABR.
... (read more)Five poems have been shortlisted in the 2016 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. The poets are Dan Disney, Anne Elvey, Amanda Joy, Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet, and Campbell Thomson; their poems can be read here. The judges on this occasion were Luke Davies, Lisa Gorton, and Kate Middleton.
Join us at our studio in Boyd Community Hub on Wednesday, 9 March (6 pm), when the poets will introduce and read their works, followed by the announcement of the overall winner, who will receive $5,000 and an Arthur Boyd print. This is a free event, but reservations are essential.
These ceremonies always commence with a series of readings of poems written by Peter Porter (1929–2010). This year our readers – Judith Bishop (winner in 2006 and 2011), Morag Fraser, Lisa Gorton, and Peter Rose among them – may choose to dip into the new collection of late Porter poems: Chorale at the Crossing (Picador, $24.99 pb).
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