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The 2023 ABIA Audiobook of the Year

Siang Lu's searing debut is a black comedy about the whitewashing of the Asian film industry, told in the form of an oral documentary

It sounded like a good idea at the time—A Hollywood spy thriller, starring, for the first time in history, an Asian male lead. With an estimated $350 million production budget and up-and-coming Hong Kong actor JK Jr, who, let's be honest, is not the sharpest tool in the shed, but probably the hottest, Brood Empire was basically a sure thing. Until it wasn't.

So how did it all fall apart? There were smart guys involved. So smart, so woke. So woke it hurts. There was topnotch talent across the board and the financial backing of a heavyweight Chinese studio. And yet, Brood Empire is remembered now not as a historical landmark of Asian representation that smashed the bamboo ceiling in Hollywood, but rather as a fiasco of seismic proportions.

The Whitewash is the definitive oral history of the whole sordid mess. Unofficial. Unasked for. Only intermittently fact-checked, and featuring a fool's gallery of actors, producers, directors, film historians and scummy click-bait journalists, to answer the question of how it all went so horribly, horribly wrong.

Congratulations to my SquareSound colleagues Maryanne Plazzer (producer) and Yen Nguyen (director), and their wonderful cast. I was pleased to be able to contribute by directing Yen during his stint in the booth! See him in action as JK . . .
https://www.instagram.com/p/CmaA-QmA3aN/

And with the rest of the cast
https://www.instagram.com/p/CmYaBj7hzek/

Highly Commended in the 2022 ABIA Audiobook of the Year Award for "Outstanding Achievement in adaptation and production"

Directed by Justine Sloane-Lees at SquareSound Studios for Hachette Australia Audio

Shortlisted for the Australian Writers' Guild 55th Annual AWGIES Audio Fiction Award

Fitzroy Diaries is back, and this time, the streets are bare, everyone’s stuck at home. There are numbers that come in daily, and they seem to colour everything. But there are also new neighbours to get to know, old friends to stumble on, and a pile of cardboard boxes threatening to topple over at any moment.

Fitzroy Diaries is the award-winning audio fiction series created by Melbourne writer Lorin Clarke.

Directed by Justine Sloane-Lees for ABC RN

If Emily and Scott can write one more best seller together, the world’s their oyster. But each of them believes they’re the talent....

Emily was an aspiring literary writer, forced to make a living from editing annual reports, when she met Scott, a screenwriter in similar circumstances. With Scott’s punchy plot and Emily’s luminous prose, they crafted an international hit - and fell in love doing it. Three years later, Scott’s own novel has flopped, Emily’s struggling with her literary manuscript, and their relationship is falling apart. Can they overcome their creative differences to produce another masterpiece?

Graeme Simsion is the internationally best-selling author of The Rosie Project, The Rosie Effect, The Rosie Result and The Best of Adam Sharp. He lives with Anne Buist, a novelist in her own right and co-author with him of two books, in Melbourne.

This project is a work of fiction; any resemblance to actual persons or events is entirely coincidental. Sort of.

Featuring Edwina Wren and Stephen Phillips
Directed by Justine Sloane-Lees at SquareSound Studio for Audible Australia

Shortlisted for the2021 Australian Book Industry Association's Audiobook of the Year

Find out who you are, and live that life.

Late in the night, 14-year-old Sam Watson steps onto a quiet overpass, climbs over the rail and looks down at the road far below. At the other end of the same bridge, an old man, Vic, smokes his last cigarette. The two see each other across the void. A fateful connection is made, and an unlikely friendship blooms. Slowly, we learn what led Sam and Vic to the bridge that night. Bonded by their suffering, each privately commits to the impossible task of saving the other.

Honeybee is a heart-breaking, life-affirming novel that throws us headlong into a world of petty thefts, extortion plots, botched bank robberies, daring dog rescues and one spectacular drag show.

Cast, directed and engineered by Justine Sloane-Lees at SquareSound Studio for Wavesound Audiobooks

Shortlisted for the Australian Writers' Guild 54th Annual AWGIES Audio Award

Belinda and Marco are The Right Fit. Or are they?

They've been matchmade by the eponymous dating agency in the small rural town Belinda has moved to for work and where Marco has lived all his life. But, really, they seem to have so little in common. And are they both actually looking for the same thing?

This new audio fiction by acclaimed playwright Ross Mueller is a rom-com written to showcase the talents of Melbourne-based actors Belinda McClory and Marco Chiappi. Ross wrote his first radio drama over twenty-five years ago, and his work has since been performed by main-stage theatre companies across Australia. He has been an international resident at London's Royal Court Theatre, and in 2020 was a winner of the BBC World Service/British Council's International Radio Playwriting Competition. He is currently working on an audio docudrama for Audible, and is in active development on TV projects with production companies Princess Pictures and Northern Pictures.

Directed by Justine Sloane-Lees for ABC RN

As bushfires rage outside the city, three women watch a performance of a Samuel Beckett play. Margot is a successful professor, preoccupied by her fraught relationship with her ailing husband. Ivy is a philanthropist with a troubled past, distracted by the snoring man beside her. Summer is a young theatre usher, anxious about the safety of her girlfriend in the fire zone.

As the performance unfolds, so does each woman's story. By the time the curtain falls, they will all have a new understanding of the world beyond the stage.

Melbourne author Claire Thomas has conceived something of a meta-fiction, where the action on stage in what is one of the great postmodernist plays resonates deeply within these three women in the audience, as they search for meaning and question the significant relationships in which they are bound. And, to heighten this effect, the middle of the book - the intermission of the performance - is written as a audio drama, where the women's narratives begin intruding on each other.

Directed by Justine Sloane-Lees at SquareSound Studios for Hachette Australia Audio

The Audiobook Podcast is a program for makers and listeners of audiobooks. What goes on behind the making of a professional audiobook? We will break all that down for you. Each episode Justine Sloane-Lees and Abbe Holmes, leading professionals in voice acting and audiobooks, talk together and with a wide range of guests on a different topic. So whether you are a novelist, or have a professional studio or publishing house, if you are an author, director, engineer, narrator or audiobook lover, this program is for you.

The Audiobook Podcast is recorded in the booth at SquareSound Studios, one of Australia's leading audiobook production houses. SquareSound was founded in 2015 and is lead by some of the best in the industry.

https://audiobookpodcast.buzzsprout.com/

Get Up Mum is based on the childhood memoir of author Justin Heazlewood, charting one year in the life of a 12-year old growing up in Tasmania in the early '90s.

As a child, Justin had a hobby — obsessively capturing the voices of his family and friends on tape, including his Mum who lives with schizophrenia. This series is an intimate portrait of what it is like to be both a kid and a carer, and a time capsule of one family's life as they try to come to grip with mental illness in the best way they can.

Abridged and adapted for radio by Justine Sloane-Lees

Crossing Boundaries is an anthology of Indonesian short stories.The collection contains stories from across the archipelago written by some of the country's most exciting writers, including rising literary star Eka Kurniawan, and emerging voices such as Wa Ode Wulan Ratna and Uda Agus. Each story conveys a vivid sense of Indonesian society today—these are stories of city life, love and conflict in small villages, and fantastical goings on.

A feature on Greece's preminent living poet, Kiki Dimoula.

The vast island nation of the Philippines has a large number of native tongues. Colonial occupation in recent centuries, first by Spain and then the United States, meant foreign languages were imposed on the people. But over recent decades writers have started developing a poetic tradition that captures the diversity of the country and its peoples, its beauty, and the struggle to emerge from colonial times into the modern world. This program features four poets: Rolando S Tinio, Rio Alma, Jose F Lacaba and Dinah Roma.

“Blame it on the boogie . . " The Jackson Five, 1978

Across time and cultures, human beings have turned to dance for ceremony and celebration. This exuberant collection of poems and music explores just some of its many forms, from tango to Time Warp, waltz and flamenco, ballet and Black Bottom.

It seems patently absurd to us in the twenty-first century that there could ever have been a time when parents were discouraged from holding and comforting their babies. But as recently as the 1950s, the orthodoxy was that doing so 'weakened' the child and could cause a variety of serious problems in later adulthood.

Josephine Rowe is a writer of short fiction, poetry and essays. She is the author of the short story collections How a Moth Becomes a Boat, and Tarcutta Wake, which was long-listed for the 2013 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Her poetry collections are Asynchrony and Vanellinae and other poems.