The RMIT WrICE Program’s Established Writer and Early Career Writer Fellowships have been granted to multi-award winning writer Alice Pung (Unpolished Gem, Her Father’s Daughter, Laurinda) and Michele Lee, Asian-Australian playwright and author whose memoir Banana Girl was published in 2013.
The Fellows will join a face-to-face community of writers in a collaborative immersion residency in Guangzhou and Yangshou, China, in April 2016 and a reciprocal residency later that year in Melbourne, in association with the Melbourne Writers Festival and Footscray Community Arts Centre.
Alice Pung, who has this year been shortlisted as Sydney Morning Herald’s Young Novelist of the Year, said ‘I am so honoured to be invited to go to Guangzhou on this fellowship. What makes this trip even more special is that the South of China is where my family ancestry derives, and it will be the first time my husband and baby will visit China. I feel like I am going back to my roots, as a writer.’
Michele Lee, who is a graduate of the RMIT Diploma in Professional Writing and Editing said ‘I think WrICE will help me shake up my own illusions, some new, some formed in childhood, and some long before that, inherited from my parents and theirs before them. And these useful ruptures will trickle into my imagination, into my keyboard, into writing.’
‘Since 2014, we have brought together 22 emerging and established writers from the across the region for collaborative residencies and public events in Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and Melbourne’ said WrICE Co-Director David Carlin. ‘WrICE is forming a rich mosaic of connections between writers across the region, a creative community in which Alice Pung and Michele Lee will be both warmly welcomed and highly esteemed.’
WrICE (Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange Program) is a program of reciprocal cultural exchange and cultural immersion focused on writers and writing. WrICE is an initiative of the nonfictionLab at RMIT University, generously supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.
For interviews and general media enquiries: Alison Barker, 0433389497