‘Tumbleweed: How the West was lost’ by Maria Takolander

‘And yet: Towards disabled literary utopia’ by Jessica White

This week, on The ABR Podcast, Jessica White reviews Crip Stories: An anthology of disabled writers that attempts to ‘represent as wide a variety of multiply marginalised disabled experiences as possible’. The writing collected in this book is multivalent, taking a ‘welcome intersectional approach to anthologising’. Yet, despite growing interest in disabled people’s writing, White notes, we are still far from an ‘accessible disabled literary utopia’. ‘In a world of increasing homogenisation,’ White points out, ‘disabled people’s writing remains a refreshing reminder of the creativity that our bodies generate.’ Jessica White is a Deaf author and academic living on Kaurna country. She has published two novels, as well as a hybrid memoir about deafness in 2019, Hearing Maud, which won the Michael Crouch Award for a début work of biography and was shortlisted for four major literary awards. Her most recent work is Silence is my Habitat: Ecobiographical essays (2025). White is Associate Professor in Creative Writing and Literary Studies at Adelaide University. Here is Jessica White with ‘And yet: Towards disabled literary utopia’, published in the July issue of ABR. See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

‘A deeper kind of itch: Poetry of the mirrored plate’ by Lisa Gorton

This week on The ABR Podcast, Lisa Gorton reviews Tomorrow by Peter Goldsworthy. A poetic companion to Goldsworthy’s ‘expansive, thoughtful’ memoir The Cancer Finishing School, Tomorrow braids the everyday experience with the ironic, the meaningful, the terrifying: the poetry ‘charges familiar things with terror’, Gorton writes. But the strength of Goldsworthy’s poetry lies in the unexpected; in some images, Gorton points out, ‘lonely terror bends weirdly around to meet the companionship of old poems and dead friends’. Goldsworthy brings ‘a new voice’ to ‘the small hours, the long minutes’ of the insomniac’s night: ‘This time / it’s serious. // And more intimate./ A deeper kind // of itch.’ Lisa Gorton is a poet, novelist, and critic, and a former Poetry Editor of ABR. A Rhodes Scholar, she completed a Masters in Renaissance Literature and a Doctorate on John Donne at Oxford University, and was awarded the John Donne Society Award for Distinguished Publication in Donne Studies. Her first poetry collection, Press Release (2007), won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry. She has also been awarded the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize. Here is Lisa Gorton with ‘A deeper kind of itch: Poetry of the mirrored plate’, published in the July issue of ABR. See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

‘Vulnerable to place: Navigating deep blue history’ by Killian Quigley

This week, on The ABR Podcast, we feature Killian Quigley’s review of Plotting the Oceans: Stories of powerful maps and their makers by Sarah Hamylton. Hamylton’s sharp insights emerge from her deeply embodied knowledge of her environment, Quigley asserts. In an era where ‘drones, algorithms, and artificial intelligence are transforming how maps are made’, such ‘situated knowledge’ is increasingly valuable. While technological advancement is inevitable, Quigley urges a renewed ‘attention to the bodies that map – that sweat, are sunburnt and shark-nibbled’. ‘To be physically present in a place – and physically vulnerable to that place – is to know it in a way’ that remote technologies cannot. Killian Quigley is a teacher and senior researcher at the Australian Catholic University’s Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. He is the co-editor, with Margaret Cohen, of The Aesthetics of the Undersea, published in 2019. Here is Killian Quigley with ‘Vulnerable to place: Navigating deep blue history’, published in the June issue of ABR. See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

‘Tumbleweed: How the West was lost’ by Maria Takolander

This week on The ABR Podcast, we feature the runner-up in the 2026 Calibre Essay Prize, titled ‘Tumbleweed: How the West was Lost’, by Maria Takolander. Wide-ranging and delightfully digressive, Takolander’s encyclopaedic essay uses the modest tumbleweed as a lens through which to examine Western mythology, colonial violence, environmental crises, and Tsarist Russia, among much else. ‘The tumbleweed is a celebrity, albeit a minor one’, Takolander writes. Maria Takolander was the inaugural winner of the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize in 2010. She is the author of four poetry collections and a book of short stories. Her début novel, The End of Romance, will be published by Text Publishing in June. The Calibre Essay Prize, now in its twentieth year, is one of the world’s leading prizes for a new non-fiction essay. Here is Maria Takolander with ‘Tumbleweed: How the West was lost’, published in the June issue of ABR. See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

‘“One of our rarest gifts”: David Malouf in the pages of Australian Book Review’ by Carissa Chye

This week on The ABR Podcast, we feature Carissa Chye’s essay on David Malouf, titled ‘One of our rarest gifts’. A retrospective piece on ABR’s rich, generative relationship with Malouf, Chye’s essay recalls how Malouf’s ‘work and presence animated the literary life of the journal’. Taking us through the ABR archive, Chye observes that ‘the enduring singularity of Malouf’s literary vision is traceable through the convergent ways critics responded to the same defining impulses in his work’. Across decades of literary dialogue and imaginative essaying,’ she writes, ‘Malouf’s work was gently pedagogic of a particular mode of careful reading’. Carissa Chye is the ABR Peter Rose Editorial Cadet. Here is Carissa Chye with ‘One of our rarest gifts’: David Malouf in the pages of Australian Book Review’, published in the June issue of ABR. See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.