Mireille Juchau

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**The ABR Podcast**

Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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Episode #189

‘Hold your nerve’

By Natasha Sholl

Last month ABR announced the winner, runner-up and third-place recipient of the 2024 Calibre Essay Prize. In this week’s podcast we are delighted to present the 2024 Calibre runner-up, ‘Hold Your Nerve’, by Melbourne writer Natasha Sholl. Natasha Sholl is a writer and lapsed lawyer. Her work has appeared in publications including The Guardian, The Age, Good Weekend and Mamamia. Her debut book, Found, Wanting, was published by Ultimo Press in 2022. Listen to Natasha Sholl with ‘Hold Your Nerve’, published in the June issue of ABR.

Recent episodes:

The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez

by Mireille Juchau •

January-February 2024, no. 461

Mireille Juchau reviews ‘The Vulnerables’ by Sigrid Nunez

What does it mean to narrate the humiliations of ageing, loneliness, and death in the first person when your background is working class? For such a writer, saying ‘I’ is political too, said Annie Ernaux in her Nobel Prize lecture, because it involves claiming an authority rarely granted in other parts of life. Ernaux uses her incendiary, affectless ‘I’ not just to recount one individual experience, but to transcend it. For ‘I’ to speak to the reader it must become, she says, ‘transpersonal’.

... (read more)

Open Page with Mireille Juchau

by Australian Book Review •

January-February 2016, no. 378

I have a recurring dream about discovering an enticing space in my own home – a basement or garden – always just out of reach. Its residue is an elated sense of creative possibility. I like the sign the symbolist poet Saint-Pol-Roux put on his door before sleep: Poet at work.

... (read more)

The World Without Us by Mireille Juchau

by Susan Lever •

September 2015, no. 374

Susan Lever reviews 'The World Without Us' by Mireille Juchau

From the opening pages of Mireille Juchau’s new novel, The World Without Us, we know we are in the hands of a poetic writer in control of language and ready to invest every sentence with resonant detail. In this scene, two of the central characters encounter each other at a river above a waterfall:

Now the water was strung with ...