The first China Australia Literary Forum took place from 29th August - 2nd September 2011, and was hosted by Writing and Society Research Centre, University of Western Sydney.
The focus of the Forum was critical issues that define contemporary Australian and Chinese writing, and included topics such as 'Writing Across Borders', 'Contemporary Approaches to Literature', 'The Writer and Tradition', 'The Role of the Writer', and 'A Sense of Place'.
Participating Australian literary authors included: Alexis Wright, Judith Beveridge, Kim Cheng Boey, Lisa Gorton, Gail Jones, Julia Leigh, Shane Maloney, John Mateer, Michael Wilding, Ouyang Yu.
Participating Chinese writers included: Zhang Wei, Mo Yan, Li Er, Sheng Keyi, Zhaxi Dawa, and Gao Hongbo.
Participating scholars and translators included: Ivor Indyk.
The event also included public readings by authors, and a Public Industry Forum, which focused on "New Directions in Chinese and Australia Literature and Their Markets, presented by Gao Hongbo, Vice President of the Chinese Writers’ Association, and Susan Hayes, Director Literature, Australia Council, in discussion with various other industry leaders."*DE9
This forum directly resulted led to a Chinese translation of Alexis Wright's novel Carpentaria, by Li Yao.
The event was support by Copyright Agency, Australia-China Council, Australian Chinese Writers' Association, and Chinese Ministry of Culture.*OP2
Judith Beveridge ( 拜弗瑞基 ) was born in London, England in 1956 and migrated with her family to Australia in 1960, attending school in the western suburbs of Sydney. She studied communications at the University of Technology, Sydney, and has worked at part-time jobs as a research officer, library assistant, teacher and in the field of bush regeneration, in order to allow herself time to write.
Beveridge has received fellowships from the Australia Council to assist in her poetry writing and her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.
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Kim Cheng Boey ( 梅健青 ) came to Australia in 1996 and is an Australian citizen. He has lectured in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle, and joined Nanyang Technological University in 2016.
He published three collections of poetry in Singapore, Somewhere-Bound (Times Books International, c1989), Another Place (Times Books International, c1992) and Days of No Name (EPB Publishers, 1996).
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Lisa Gorton ( 莉莎·戈顿 ) is a poet, essayist, reviewer and novelist. Her first novel, The Life of Houses (2015) was co-winner of the Prime Minister's Award for Fiction in 2016. She has also written a children's book, Cloudland.
Lisa's fist collection of poetry, Press Release, won the Victorian Premier's Award for Poetry in 2008, and was a finalist for the Melbourne Prize, Best Writing Award.
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Gail Jones ( 盖尔·琼斯 )was educated at the University of Western Australia (UWA), later joining the staff as an Associate Professor in the English Department there. In 2001, she won The Australian University Teaching Award in the Humanities and the Arts category. After working at UWA, Jones took up a position as professor within the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney. Her academic interests include gender and narrative theory, literary theory, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, creative writing, contemporary and Australian literature, and cinema studies.
Her short stories have appeared in numerous journals and have been highly praised for their linguistic richness and intellectual complexity, their subtle humour and intricate craftwork.
Jones has published seven novels to date (2018). Her structually complex debut novel Black Mirror was described by the judges of the Nita Kibble Literary Award as 'a witty interrogation of the problems faced by the biographer'. She followed this work with Sixty Lights, Dreams of Speaking, Sorry, Five Bells, A Guide to Berlin, and the forthcoming The Death of Noah Glass. Between them, her novels have won the Colin Roderick Award, the Nita Kibble Award (twice), the Western Australian Premier's Book Award (twice), the South Australian Premier's Award, the Barbara Ramsden Award, and the T.A.G. Hungerford Award, and have been shortlisted and longlisted for national and international prizes including the Miles Franklin Award and the Booker Prize. She won the Philip Hodgins Award (for a consistently outstanding Australian writer) in 2011.
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Nicholas Jose ( 尼古拉斯·周思 ) was born in London, and grew up in Australia. He was educated at St Peter's College, Adelaide, and the Australian National University. Winning a Rhodes Scholarship in 1974, he completed a PhD on seventeenth century English literature at Oxford University. He taught for several years at the Australian National University before spending eighteen months teaching and writing in China. In 1987 he was appointed Cultural Counsellor at the Australian Embassy in Beijing, an appointment he held until 1990.
Jose's first book of fiction is the short story collection The Possession of Amber (1980). During the 1980s he published another collection and several novels, including the widely-admired Avenue of Eternal Peace (1989), the first of Jose's novels to exhibit his interest in Chinese language and culture. Since 1990, Jose has written more novels based on his experience and knowledge of China, and a novel, The Custodians(1996), that explores the concept of custodianship in Australia. He has also written reviews, short stories, essays, poetry and travel articles, many of which deal with aspects of Chinese art and culture. His novel The Red Thread (2000) interweaves his translation of the Chinese story Six Chapters of a Floating Life with a contemporary narrative by using a red ink for the former story. Jose's writing has been supported by fellowships from the Australia-China Council, the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Australia Council.
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Julia Leigh ( 茱莉亚·利 ) studied Arts/Law at the University of Sydney and in 1989 was editor of the University's student paper, Honi Soit. Leigh's first novel The Hunter was published to national and international acclaim and reviewed widely. The novel was named as one of the New York Times Notable Books of the Year in 2001 and was longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US. In the UK it was longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2000 and Leigh was nominated by the Observer as one of the 21 writers for the 21st century.
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John Mateer ( 约翰·马提尔 ) is a poet, art critic and practising Buddhist who grew up in an English-speaking family in South Africa and Canada. Prior to being conscripted during 'the State of Emergency' in South Africa, he moved with his parents to Western Australia in 1989 and then to Melbourne in 1998. Mateer graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts and Literature from the University of Western Australia.
His poetry has been published and reviewed in journals and newspapers in Australia, South Africa, Indonesia, the United Kingdom and the United States. He has occasionally written in Afrikaans 'in order to examine more fully what it means to be African' (Fremantle Arts Review, Aug/Sept 1994).
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Michael Wilding ( 麦克·威尔汀 ) is a novelist, biographer and critic and now regarded as one of Australia's leading contemporary authors. He has published over twenty novels and short story collections, and over 20 biographies. His short stories have also been published widely in anthologies of modern Australian writing, and many have appeared in translation.
Wilding has edited a number of short story anthologies, in the 1990s he served for a number of years as a Sydney Festival Writers' Week committee member, and he has also been a Chair of the N.S.W. Writers' Centre.
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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.
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.
Subsequently, 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.
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