CONTRIBUTORS

Merlinda Bobis

Merlinda Bobis is an award-winning writer with 4 novels, 6 poetry books, a collection of short stories, and 9 dramatic works. Her awards include: the 2016 Christina Stead Prize NSW Premier’s Award for her novel, Locust Girl. A Lovesong; three Philippine National Book Awards also for Locust Girl and an earlier novel, Fish-Hair Woman, and for her collection of short stories, White Turtle, which also won the Steele Rudd Award for the Best Published Collection of Australian Short Stories. She also received the Prix Italia, the Australian Writers’ Guild Award and the Ian Reed Prize for her radio play, Rita’s Lullaby. Her first novel, Banana Heart Summer, was shortlisted for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal and her poetry collection, Summer Was a Fast Train Without Terminals, for The Age Poetry Book of the Year. Her latest poetry book, Accidents of Composition, was Highly Commended for the 2018 ACT Book of the Year. She lives and writes in Canberra.

Introduction to Lucy Van’s The Open

All doors are open in Lucy Van’s poetry. Ingress and egress are multiple, even coincident. We’ve just touched what’s here, or are about to touch it, when apprehension is quickly unsettled, halted or reconfigured.

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‘A way of breathing together’: Winnie Dunn Interviews Merlinda Bobis

Merlinda Bobis is a poet first and foremost but her extensive body of work has transpired across novels, plays, performances, essays, and works for radio. A single dialogue between us can in no way capture her incredible writing, which is …

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Story Circle: The Transnational Story Hub and the Inspiraciones Literarias

In February 2012, the Transnational Story Hub (University of Wollongong writers) responded in poetry to Collections of Hopes and Dreams, an exhibition of artifacts and stories of migration and settlement in Australia at the Wollongong City Gallery.

An initiative of the Migrant Heritage Project and curated by Eva Castle, this exhibition recorded the experiences of European migrants and refugees (Croatian, German, Hungarian, Polish, Ukrainian) who arrived in the Illawarra after World War II. Aptly titled The Story Circle: Bearing Witness to Hopes and Dreams, our poetry response project was supported by the South Coast Writers Centre and its Director Friederike Krishnabhakdi-Vasilakis.

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Kosa: Hair

‘I had very long hair … but I was a cleaner, there were the children … so I had to cut it, and the German hairdresser said, “Are you sure?” … So she tied a band around my hair, looked …

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