The Writer Podcast

Oliver Smuhar is Australian, but his new podcast speaks directly to Americans. His new Australian scripted podcast, The Writer, launched on May 12. It blends the intimacy of audio with the tension and pacing of a serialized TV drama.

The Writer podcast uses a future war as a backdrop to a dialogue about the nature of truth and the power of propaganda. When Americans hear that a nation’s nuclear capability has been obliterated and then six months later it is one of the pretexts for starting a war, truth becomes untethered from reality. When a large swath of the American population denies that our chief executive had a convicted pedophile as one of his closest friends and that their past joint actions were being denied and covered up by a slavish conservative media, truth becomes subservient to political obsessions.

The premise of The Writer is devastatingly simple, yet provocatively multi-layered and strikes at the heart of humans’ ability to dissect truth from propaganda. When World War III begins, a young writer is drafted into the Foxtrot Unit, a psychological operation team tasked with documenting the war through stories that blend truth with deception. Some of what listeners will hear is true. Some is not. The challenge is figuring out what’s real and what’s made up.

The podcast has been described as “Full Metal Jacket meets Arcane, with the tension of London Has Fallen.” The series mixes character-driven drama, dystopian fiction, and psychological elements to create a cinematic audio experience.

The series runs weekly from May 12 to August 4, 2026, and contains 13 episodes. This podcast has been created and narrated by Oliver Smuhar.

Smuhar observes, “This is NOT a traditional podcast. It’s a television series for your ears. At its core, The Writer is less about the battlefield and more about what war does to ordinary people. It explores what a large-scale global conflict would mean for younger Australians, particularly those in Gen Z, who are left to live with the consequences of decisions they had no role in shaping.”

“The series blends the intimacy of audiobooks with the narrative pacing and structure of serialized television,” notes Mr. Smuhar.

Oliver Smuhar is a multi-award-winning Australian writer. He has published 4 books, completed 15 book manuscripts, written several screenplays for film and television, and crafted various comic book scripts for illustrators.

Oliver Smuhar has a Bachelor of Communications Journalism from the University of Technology, Sydney.

He has written 12 book manuscripts, including a #1 best-selling contemporary fantasy on Amazon, many screenplays for film and television, and various comic book scripts for illustrators, including a four-issue graphic novel series.

He has previously attended the Blue Mountains Writers’ Festival, given several author talks at schools such as St Columba’s Catholic College and Korowal School, appeared on podcasts, and been featured in mainstream news media.

You can get a sense of how immensely talented Mr. Smuhar is by this quote from him about one of his most popular novels, The Gift Of Life.

“At the end of 2019, I decided to look back on what I had already created and perfect it before continuing my passion for storytelling. This means re-releasing my original fantasy epic, The Gifts of Life (2018), with a new cover, new typesetting, and creative new ways to treat my readers. However, that’s also when the 2019–20 Australian Wildfires begun! I hand-drew and painted 36 images for each chapter, remastered my glossary, painted an extra 14 crests that represented the main character’s spirit animals, drew several new maps for both cities, Kelton Whide and Everbreen, and floor plans for the interior of important locations like Master Othello’s House, and as a result, felt this sense of immersion. I was sixteen again, dreaming this world as though it were real. It was real!”

Mr. Smuhar continues: “In terms of my career, it’s shifted from different mediums over the years. At the heart of it all, I love telling a good story. In 2024, I made a short film and hired a professional sound designer to hop on during post-production to fix any of the film’s dialogue and to help with the pacing. He invited me to his studio, and for two days we put our heads down and made one hell of a film. During this period, he taught me a lot of neat tricks with sound design.”

Mr. Smuhar’s genius shines through in The Writer. His podcast creation has cinematic sound design, professional audio recording, an atmospheric score, and a complex character arc. Clearly, Mr. Smuhar is comfortable with world-building.

I highly recommend The Writer. Mr. Smuhar’s series can be summarized by a famous quote from philosopher Eric Hoffer, who once observed that, “Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.”