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. She speaks to Iranians in the diaspora, including a London-based academic from Tehran who withheld his name for security reasons, about his concerns around regime change through conflict. Many Iranians think ‘any regime is better than this one’, he reflects, ‘but we can always go deeper into darkness. I don’t want to replace a theocratic regime with a secular but proto-fascist one.’

Zoe Holman is a journalist, writer, and poet whose work has appeared in outlets including The Economist, the Guardian, London Review of Books, and Jacobin. She is the author of Where the Water Ends: Seeking refuge in Fortress Europe. Here is Zoe Holman with ‘Deeper into darkness: Iran after the twelve-day war’, published in the September issue of ABR.

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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. Stunningly written, savagely honest, this is a story about grief – the grief of losing a father, the grief of losing a childhood, the grief of having to live beyond a state of innocence.

Tara Sharman, at twenty-two years old, becomes the youngest winner of an ABR prize. Here is ‘Shelling’ by Tara Sharman, published in the August issue of ABR.

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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. Hollier recalls the invitation of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to Australia, to ‘come closer to Asia’. ‘Seventy years on,’ he says, ‘Nehru’s invitation still calls to us, however faintly.’

Nathan Hollier is Manager of The Australian National University Press and co-editor of Profiles in courage: Political actors & ideas in contemporary Asia. Here he is with ‘“Come nearer to Asia”: Australia’s place at Bandung, 1955’, published in the September issue of ABR.

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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. Ng considers Nguyen’s primary subject – the category of otherness – and what ‘it means for such a significant part of the population to be continuously singled out and labelled as “other”’. Lynda Ng is a Lecturer in World Literature (including Australian Literature) at the University of Melbourne. She is the editor of Indigenous Transnationalism: Essays on Carpentaria (2018). Here is Lynda Ng with ‘Other Orientalisms: Refusing to be spectacle’, published in the August issue of ABR.

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