An excerpt from “When race and class collide, the biggest challenge is using your voice” by Alice Pung first published on The Guardian. When you are seven months pregnant, your husband and you go to a local hardware store. When you return 20 minutes later to the carpark, someone has put a folded piece of […]

WrICE Workshops University of the Philippines, Diliman With Christos Tsiolkas and Norman Erikson Pasaribu Part 2 of the workshop from Christos Tsiolkas and Norman Erikson Pasaribu focussed on characterisation, where characters come from, how they’re developed, and the work they do for the story. Tsiolkas says that he starts with a question or issue, then thinks […]

WrICE workshops, University of the Philippines, Diliman Contemporary Approaches to Nonfiction with David Carlin and John Hughes This session examines a particular mode of nonfiction, the essay tradition, which is as strong in film as it is in literature. David and John begin the workshop by questioning where we come from in approaching nonfiction and […]

WrICE workshops, University of the Philippines, Diliman Approaches to Contemporary Poetry Ellen van Neerven and Nhã Thuyên In the middle of a classroom, two poets are dancing. Ellen van Neerven and Nhã Thuyên – each holding handwritten signs – face each other and sway, back and forth, retreating and gaining. One sign says contemporary poetry; […]

WrICE Workshops, University of the Philippines, Diliman February 2017 Christos Tsiolkas and Norman Erikson Pasaribu The setting for the first workshop is the University of the Philippines in Diliman. There’s a hushed scholarly atmosphere, the audience mostly made up of English department students and academics. The constant thrum of a large air conditioner is regularly […]

Five Australian and five Asia-Pacific writers recently travelled to the Philippines in January 2017 for the fourth WrICE collaborative residency, including Australian Established and Early Career writer fellows Christos Tsiolkas and Ellen Van Neerven. The residency in Vigan enabled the writers to engage in deep cultural exchange of knowledge, creativity, skills and cultural perspectives. This […]

Why do we write? was the salient question put to the international writers at Writers Across Borders hosted by WrICE co-founder David Carlin on Friday night. Carlin brought together the five WrICE fellows from around the Asia Pacific, as well as our own Michele Lee and Alice Pung, to talk about how cultural exchange in […]

Since the 1980s PEN International has used Empty Chairs to represent writers who couldn’t be present at events – because they were imprisoned, detained, disappeared, threatened or killed. The Protest and Rebellion session at the Melbourne Writers session began with moderator Omar Musa (WrICE 2015) dedicating the empty chair onstage to Andy Hall, who’s awaiting […]

    Last night, in the midst of Melbourne Writers Festival, WrICE fellows and alumni gathered in the uber-stylish RMIT Design Hub to kick off the Melbourne-based installment of WrICE 2016 and to bring together friends and fellows of the program in a night of story-telling, song, wine and classic Chinese finger foods. We were fortunate to […]