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Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.
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Episode #184
In this week’s ABR Podcast, Michael Shmith reviews a memoir from poet, novelist, librettist, and Adelaide GP Peter Goldsworthy. The book’s title is The Cancer Finishing School. Shmith begins by observing that doctors aren’t supposed to become incurably ill, before immediately recognising this as the useless delusion of a patient. Michael Shmith is a Melbourne-based writer and editor whose most recent book is Merlyn, a biography of the widow of Sidney Myer. Listen to Michael Shmith’s ‘It might be …: P is for Peter, physician, patient, poet’, published in the April issue of ABR.
Ann-Marie Priest’s My Tongue Is My Own, published by La Trobe University Press and reviewed in our June issue, is the first authorised biography of the Australian poet Gwen Harwood (1920–1995). Unsurprisingly, this was not the first attempt to record the life of one of Australia’s most loved and admired poets. In an exclusive feature for ABR, John Harwood reflects on the conflicting motives behind his literary executorship of his mother’s estate – an estate holding the secrets to an at-times fractious marriage between two opposing temperaments.
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