‘Backflip’ by Sam Keenan | The ABR Podcast #289

This week on The ABR Podcast , we feature ‘Backflip’ by New Zealand author Sam Keenan, which placed second in the 2026 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Set in a small New Zealand town in the 1980s, ‘Backflip’ tells the story of a young girl’s disappearance and the community’s attempt to smooth over this tragedy. This year’s judges called ‘Backflip’ a ‘remarkable feat of compression: a…