The Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange Program (WrICE), now in its fifth year, will partner with the Jakarta Post Writing Center in 2018. WrICE contributes to an Asia Pacific community of writers in a collaborative way, while the writers centre is attached to The Jakarta Post, Indonesia’s multi-award winning, leading English-language daily newspaper. In April and […]

Else Fitzgerald No more streetlights. The water oily-slick and black down Canning Street. Wade from the raft to the staircase and climb up to the second floor, tide lines spidery on the wall like veins. Still night air thick with smell of damp and the funk of the kero lamps. The condensation beading on the […]

Three students have been selected as emerging writer fellows to take part the next WrICE collaborative residency in Indonesia. A project supported by the Copyright Agency. Fiona Murphy, Andy Butler and Saaro Umar are off to Indonesia in 2018 for a writing workshop. Each year the Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange (WrICE) offers three Emerging Writer Fellowships […]

Asia What?: Writers Across Borders – Melbourne Writers Festival ‘One of the most valuable things about coming together is talking about poetry, returning to poetry,’ Christos Tsiolkas says picking up a book by Australian poet Andy Jackson, loaned to him by Vietnamese poet Nha Thuyen, one of the glut of poets sharing this stage. Ellen van […]

2017 Melbourne Writers Festival Asia What?: Indigenous Connections We are at the Melbourne Writers Festival, at the first session of Asia What? The line-up is impressive; the room is full. Bruce Pascoe joins WrICE Fellow Steven Winduo to discuss the topic of Indigenous Connections. Eugenia Flynn chairs. It is the first day of Spring, but Flynn […]

The fourth year of RMIT’s Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange Program saw five international writers reunited with Established and Early Career writers Christos Tsiolkas and Ellen van Neerven in Melbourne following a residency in the Philippines earlier in the year. Tsiolkas and van Neerven joined three Emerging Writers, who are all current students of RMIT […]

An excerpt from Michele Lee’s play ‘Going Down’. The play was developed during Michele’s participation in the China residency in 2016. NATALIE: Friday arvo. Abbottsford Centrelink. Me outside its sliding doors. One finger scrolling through my phone. Not for cock. My publisher. Marta Pacek. Marta’s great. A real feminist. After she first read my manuscript […]

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 […]