Audiobooks and Australian Literary Studies, ASAL mini conference
Australian National University, Canberra, Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country
10 - 11 February 2026
The annual mini-conference of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL), this event is supported by ASAL, ARC DECRA Project DE240100466: Audiobooks and Digital Book Culture and the ANU Research School for Humanities and the Arts.
For further information about ASAL and to register as a member, please visit the website: https://www.asal.org.au/
For any enquiries, please contact the conference convenor, Dr Millicent Weber: millicent.weber@anu.edu.au
Audiobooks have seen a recent and unexpected surge in popularity among Australian publishers and readers. AustLit began indexing audiobooks as distinct expressions in 2024 and has so far identified over 9,000 Australian audiobooks. Research conducted by Creative Australia in 2023 shows that over a third of Australians listen to audiobooks, and that they are particularly popular compared to print with Indigenous and Culturally and Linguistically Diverse readers. Yet the prevailing attitude towards audiobooks in Australia remains equivocal, with audiobooks not systematically collected in Australian cultural institutions such as the National Library of Australia or the National Film and Sound Archive, and unregulated by legislative bodies like the Australian Classifications Board. There remain significant barriers to the production and distribution of Australian audiobooks as a result of Australia’s peripheral relationship to the geopolitical publishing centres of the USA and UK. Australian writers, publishers and narrators are debarred from participating in ‘global’ marketplaces like Amazon’s Audiobook Creation eXchange (ACX), at the same time as Australian readers are prevented by territorial rights agreements from accessing notable Australian literary titles as audiobooks. Gerald Murnane’s Border Districts and Stream System, for example, are both available as audiobooks in the USA and the UK through a rights agreement between Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Audible, but cannot legally be purchased in Australia.
Helen Groth and Joseph Cummins have asked “whether it is possible to claim a distinct sonic texture for Australian literary and cultural formations”. This conference invites the extension of this question beyond the embedding of the sonic in the textual, to the realisation of the textual in the sonic. In asking what is distinctively Australian, and distinctively audiobookish, about Australian audiobooks, scholars are encouraged to consider all aspects of the incursions of audio technology in their teaching and research practice, from the new layers of interpretive possibility offered by audiobook versions of texts, to the development of methodologies suited to the audiobook form and its production and reception contexts, and the role of the audiobook in the tertiary undergraduate literary studies classroom. The audiobook is an inherently hybrid object from a disciplinary perspective, and interdisciplinary contributions include papers from media and communication studies, publishing studies, sound studies, music, library and information sciences, education, and other disciplinary areas.
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Please register through Humanitix by 30 January 2026
https://events.humanitix.com/audiobooks-and-australian-literary-studies-asal-mini-conference
The full program will be available for download shortly.
TUESDAY 10 FEBRUARY
9:00–9:15 Welcome
9:15–10:15 Keynote: An invitation to listen to story about Country, Jacqui Katona
10:15–10:45 Morning tea
10:45–12:00 Panel 1
12:00–13:00 Panel 2
13:00–14:00 Lunch
14:00–15:30 Panel 3
15:30–16:00 Afternoon tea
16:00–17:15 Panel 4
WEDNESDAY 11 FEBRUARY
9:00–10:30 Panel 5
10:30–11 Morning tea
11:00–12:00 Keynote: Conceptualizing Audio Literature(s): Born-Audio Texts between Media and Markets, Sara Tanderup Linkis
12:00–13:00 Lunch
13:00–14:30 Panel 6
14:30–15:00 Afternoon tea
15:00–16:30 Panel 7
16:30–16:45 Close and thanks
Jacqui Katona, a Djok woman, from the Kakadu area of the Northern Territory, is an Aboriginal advocate. She has worked for numerous Aboriginal organisations and agencies such as, the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, the Stolen Generations Northern Territory and assisted her family to prevent uranium mining at Jabiluka in Kakadu National Park. With Senior Traditional Owner, Yvonne Margarula, of the Mirrar, she shares the Goldman Environmental Prize for Island Nations, 1999. She is a law graduate and is currently a PhD doctoral candidate at Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research and lectures at Moondani Balluk, Victoria University. Jacqui has narrated The Swan Book and Praiseworthy written by Alexis Wright; Bush Doctors by Annabelle Brayley and Bill 'Swampy' Marsh's Great Australian Outback Nurses and Trucking Stories.
An invitation to listen to story about Country
The colonial construct of Australia has relied on the erasure of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of this continent to create its vision splendid. Where can the voices of Aboriginal people be heard? Must we rely on the narrow and desperate journalistic caricatures which pit positive and negative as the only answers to reflect the contribution of sixty-five thousand years of knowledge? It is only recently that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices are given the space and respect to emerge in a canon which originates in our ways of knowing, being and doing.
This may not be familiar to the pedestrian reader. It may require considered reflection, but the many voices of Indigenous people speak from connection to Country, our family hearth, our present and future home. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors offer their experience and observations in the knowledge that we learn from one another. The audiobook provides an inner dimension to the story of a vast, all-knowing continent and a rhythm where words can deliver feeling about Country. The audiobook offers another sense of hearing Indigenous literature come alive.
Sara Tanderup Linkis, PhD, is an associate professor in digital cultures and publishing studies at Lund University. Her research focuses on audiobooks, born-audio literature, serial fiction and media-oriented approaches to literature. She has published extensively on these topics in journals such as Orbis Litterarum, Narrative, Image & Narrative, Passage, K&K, Sound Studies and SoundEffects and is the author of two monographs: Memory, intermediality and literature (Routledge 2019) and Serialization in Literature across Media and Markets (Routledge 2021). She is PI in the project “Between Sound and Text: Production, Content and Experiences of Multimodal Audio Literature” (Swedish Research Council 2024-2026).
Conceptualizing Audio Literature(s): Born-Audio Texts between Media and Markets
The audiobook challenges how we think about literature. The format’s recent popularity transforms not only how many people read, but also how we write, produce and use literary texts. Consequently, it challenges the very concept of literature: what literature is. The talk will discuss this development focusing on the emerging category of born-audio literature: that is, texts written specifically or primarily for the audiobook format. These texts are in many cases produced by transnational platforms as Spotify, Audible or Storytel, yet they are often produced specifically for (or adjusted for) local markets. Thus, they make up an ideal case for examining how audio literature is shaped by the interplay (or clash) between transnational platform logics and local market conditions, listening cultures and target audiences. Combining insights from audio narratology (Mildorf & Kinzel 2016) and sociology of literature (Murray 2023; English 2010), I will examine how text-internal (and intermedial) strategies in the selected texts can be connected to text-external conditions relating to the audiobook format. Thus, I will compare examples from the Swedish, Indian and anglophone markets to understand how different markets conditions, literary histories and oral traditions contribute to shape contemporary texts written for sound. I combine textual analyses with results from author and industry interviews, identifying writing and publication strategies connected to born-audio fiction. Based on this material, I will explore how the born-audio format results in new (and old) ways of producing, using and conceptualizing literature.
This talk is part of the research project “Between Sound and Text: Production, Content and Experiences of Multimodal Audio Literature”, funded by the Swedish Research Council 2024-2026.
The conference will be held on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country at the Australian National University campus; the venue will be confirmed shortly.