The third China Australia Literary Forum was held in Sydney, 28-29 August 2015. The event was a collaboration between the Chiense Writers Association, the Writing and Society Research Centre, and the J.M. Coetzee Research Centre as part of an Australian Research Council funded grant - 'Other Worlds'.
Participating Australian literary authors included: Alexis Wright, John Tranter, Fiona McFarlane, Tony Macris, and Mohammed Ahmad.
Participating Chinese authors included: Yu Hua, Tie Ning, A Lai, Xu Kun, Yang Hongke, and Chen Hong.
Participating scholars and translators included: Mridula Chkraborty, Chris Andrews, Ben Etherington, and Anthony Uhlmann.
Alexis Wright ( 及艾利西斯·莱特 ), activist and award-winning writer, is from the Waanji people from the highlands of the southern Gulf of Carpentaria. Her first novel, Plains of Promise (1997), was nominated for national and international literary awards.
However, it was her second novel, Carpentaria that made Wright a figure in world literature, when she won the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2007. Carpentaria was nominated for and won five national literary awards and has been re-published and translated in the United States and in Europe. Wright’s third novel, The Swan Book (2013), was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin.
Below is a snapshot of Wrights' presentation on sovereignty of the mind at CALF 2015:
Credit: Courtesy of Writing & Society Research Centre, University of Western Sydney.
Alexis has won multiple awards.
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John Tranter was born in Cooma, New South Wales, but moved with his family to Moruya, on the south coast of New South Wales, when he was four. After attending local schools and working in his father's soft drink factory, Tranter moved to Sydney in 1961 and began an architecture degree at the University of Sydney. He abandoned his studies a year later, but returned to complete a BA in 1970 after travelling through Europe and Asia in the late 1960s.
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Fiona McFarlane was born in Sydney, and has an undergradiate in English from Sydney University, a PhD on nostalgia in American fiction from Cambridge University, and an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was a Michener Fellow. The Night Guest, her debut novel, has been translated into twelve languages and sold into territories around the world. She followed it with a collection of short stories, The High Places. Her works have won a wide range of awards, including the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Queensland Literary Awards, the Voss Literary Prize, the Barbara Jeffries Award, and the NSW Premier's Literary Awards.
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Anthony (Tony) Macris's short fiction has been published in major journals and anthologies in Australia, the United States, and Europe, and has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Penguin Best Short Story Prize 1988. In 1998 Macris was selected by the Sydney Morning Herald as one of their Australian Best Young Novelists. He is a regular contributor of reviews and articles to the Bulletin and the Sydney Morning Herald, and has been the recipient of numerous Australia Council grants.
Macris has studied in the United States and France, and holds degrees in philosophy (BA University of Sydney), creative writing (MA Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, and UTS), and creative writing, materialist aesthetics and social theory (PhD UWS). His novel-in-progress, Capital Volume One, Part Two, was highly commended for the NSW Writers' Fellowship (2000). In 2001 he represented Australia at the 38th Belgrade International Meeting of Writers.
In 2018, he was Associate Professor in the Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong.
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Michael Mohammed Ahmad is a writer, editor, and community arts worker in Western Sydney. He has been the writing coordinator at Bankstown Youth Development Service and editor of Westside. He is both founder and director of Sweatshop, a literacy movement based in Western Sydney, which provides training and employment in creative and critical writing initiatives for people from culturally and liguistically diverse backgrounds. His work in community cultural development won him the Australia Council Kirk Robson Award in 2012.
In 2017, Mohammed received a Doctorate of Creative Arts, Western Sydney University. His second novel, The Lebs, was published in February 2018.
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