Cirrus@Austlit

'This issue has been a long time coming, but I am delighted that it is finally, finally here. My thanks to the writers who stuck with us for so long. This issue would have been impossible without your patience and grace.' (Nadia Niaz : Introduction)

'Over the past few months, we have had the immense pleasure of working with Latinx writers and artists for this special issue of the Australian Multilingual Writing Project. In a time of uncertainty and loss, it has been a humbling reminder of how beautiful and connected our community is. Reading all the submissions, selecting them to feature where we had limited spots, getting to know new writers and read other sides of some we already held great affection for, has been nothing short of a privilege.' (Publication introduction)

'This new issue of the Australian Multilingual Writing Project brings with it quite a few changes. In January this year, the AMWP received an Australia Council grant that will support our publication for the next few years. In addition to being able to pay our contributors better, this means that we can now also pay our editors. With this in mind, I put out a call for multilingual editors who might be interested in working with us if we received submissions in their languages. I was overwhelmed by the response (a running theme – you’d think I’d have understood by now that the appetite for multilingual writing in Australia is in fact quite big) and ended up adding about 60 editors to our database, some of whom contributed their efforts to this issue. I hope in time to be able to engage them all.' (Introduction)

'Our third issue features some familiar voices as well as some brand-new ones and, for the first time, includes short prose as well as poetry.

'What all the writing in this issue shares in common is a deep engagement with the stories and histories embedded in each of the fourteen languages represented in this issue, and what it means to find oneself carrying these into an uncertain future. In these pages, you will find writers speaking of their parents’ pasts, their own present as they move between languages and negotiate a sense of self within them, and the challenge of raising children who retain a connection to their parents’ languages and cultures while thriving in Australia.' (From : Nadia Niaz, Introduction)

'I was both moved and delighted by the response to the first issue of the AMWP and I don’t think it an exaggeration to say that our readers are some of the most generous on the internet. Thank you for the emails, the messages and the tweets (and re-tweets!) and for being willing to sit with what must no doubt have seemed somewhat strange.' (Nadia Niaz, Introduction to AMWP Issue 2, introduction)

'Welcome to the first issue of the Australian Multilingual Writing Project journal.

'When I first posted the call for submissions, I was unsure of what kind of response I would get. Although I knew there were poets in Australia who spoke more than one language, and that some had published or performed work in two or more languages, what I was setting out to create was different from the kind of multilingualism generally presented in Australian poetry. Usually, the focus is on translation or translatability and, more often than not, poets will use just a word or two of another language in a poem written otherwise in English. While this is understandable given that Australian establishment literature is largely monolingual, my objective was to capture the way that multilingual people actually speak and think. ' (Introduction)