Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange (WrICE)

Audrey Chin, a Southeast Asian, is interested in the spaces where faith and culture intersect. Her writing has been published in Singapore, India, the UK, and the US. She has been shortlisted thrice for the Singapore Literature Prize and is a Fellow of the 2017 International Writers Programme in Iowa.

Clara Chow's publications include the story collections Dream Storeys and Modern Myths, travelogues New Orleans and Caves, and the bilingual poetry collection 几首烂情诗/Lousy Love Poems. In 2020, Modern Myths was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize.

Eugen M. Bacon, MA, MSc, PhD, is African Australian, a computer graduate mentally re-engineered into creative writing. She studied at Maritime Campus, less than two minutes' walk from The Royal Observatory of the Greenwich Meridian. Her books Ivory’s Story, Danged Black Thing and Saving Shadows are finalists in the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Awards. She has won, been longlisted or commended in international awards, including the Foreword Indies Awards, Bridport Prize, Copyright Agency Prize, Horror Writers Association Diversity Grant, Otherwise, Rhysling, Australian Shadows, Ditmar Awards and Nommo Awards for Speculative Fiction by Africans.

John Bengan teaches writing and literature at the University of the Philippines-Mindanao. His work has appeared in The Philippines Free Press, Davao Harvest 2, Likhaan Journal 6: The Journal of Contemporary Philippines Literature, Hoard of Thunder and The Brooklyn Rail. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School in New York City and has won prizes from the Philippines Free Press Literary Awards and the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for his fiction. He lives in Davao City.

Melanie Mununggurr is a Djapu mother, writer, poet and spoken word artist from Yirrkala, in East Arnhem Land. She is one of about 4600 speakers of Yolnu-Matha. Melanie writes in both English and Dhuwal about identity, family, autism and various social issues. She is also an advocate for raising autism awareness. Melanie weaves Dhuwal throughout her writing as a way of decolonising literature and the arts. In 2019 Melanie travelled 6 countries and performed at many festivals around Australia. Her first book of poetry was released by Penguin in 2020. Melanie Mununggurr-Williams is the 2018 Australian Poetry Slam Champion.

Nguyễn-Hoàng Quyên writes, translates, and curates visual art. Quyên’s words—a hybrid body of poems, essays, and translational texts—have appeared in Words Without Borders, Jacket2, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and various exhibition catalogues. She is a Stanford University graduate, a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant recipient for her translation of Chronicles of a Village by Nguyễn Thanh Hiện., and a part of AJAR—a small poetry journal-press somersaulting between Hanoi, Saigon, New York and other archipelagos.

Pandora is the editor of Tuning: An Anthology of Burmese Women Poets published in August 2012, the first of its kind in Myanmar. Her poems, essays and short stories are frequently seen in online Burmese journals, e-books and in print media. Pandora's poems have been anthologized in Bones will Crow: 15 Contemporary Burmese Poets (ARC 2012 and NIUP 2013) and in two other volumes published in Myanmar in 2013. Translations of her work by ko ko thett have appeared in Asymptote, Poetry Review, Sampsonia Way, English PEN, Bengal Lights and International Gallerie. Pandora is an alumna of the University of Iowa International Writing Program (Fall 2012). She currently lives in Yangon and is working on her first collection.

Ramya Jirasinghe is the author of several books of non-fiction including Rhythm of the Sea (on the 2004 Asian tsunami), and Trinity (the history of a missionary school in Sri Lanka). Her book of poetry, There’s an Island in the Bone, won the 2011 State Literary Joint Award for poetry. Ramya was long-listed for the Fish Poetry Prize of Ireland in 2011 and was a joint runner-up to the UK’s Guardian Orange First Words Prize of 2009. The TimesOnline of UK featured her in its 2009 selection of contemporary war poetry. In 2001 she represented Sri Lanka at the Medellin Poetry Festival, Colombia, in South America.

Rina Kikuchi is a literary scholar, poetry translator and associate professor at National Shiga University in Japan. She is currently working on her research project on Japanese women’s poetry of Asia Pacific War as a visiting fellow at the ANU and UC. Her bilingual books of poetry translations are Poet to Poet: Contemporary Women Poets from Japan (Recent Work Press, 2017, co-edited with Jen Crawford), and Pleasant Troubles (RWP 2018, co-edited with Harumi Kawaguchi).

Tim Tim Cheng is a poet and an educator from Hong Kong, currently reading the MSc in Creative Writing (Poetry) at the University of Edinburgh. She obtained a BA in English and English Literature and a BEd in English Language Teaching from Hong Kong Baptist University in 2016.

Aditi Rao is a writer, teacher, and potter. She is the author of two full length books of poetry, The Fingers Remember (Yoda Press, 2014) and A Kind of Freedom Song (Yoda Press, 2019). Her essays and poems have been widely featured in publications such as Eclectica, Four Quarters Magazine, The Feminist Wire and more. Aditi’s work has also received national and international recognition through awards and fellowships, including the Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship, the Hedgebrook Residency, the Sangam House International Writers’ Residency, the Srinivas Rayaprol Prize for Poetry, the TFA Creative Writing in English award, the Muse India–Satish Verma Young Writer Award, and others. 

Ameena Hussein (fiction/nonfiction writer; Sri Lanka) is a publisher and writer. Her debut novel The Moon in the Water was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary and the Dublin IMPAC prizes; her story collection, Fifteen, was shortlisted for the Gratiaen Prize; a second, Zillij, won the State Literary Prize. She edited Sri Lanka’s first-ever collection of adult stories, and children’s collections MilkRice, MilkRice 2 and Vampire Umpire. The author of the study Sometimes There Is No Blood, based on her sociological research on violence against women in rural Sri Lanka, she has extensive experience in community organising. In addition to directing the publishing house Hussein-Perera, which she co-founded, she works on reforestation, planting hardwood trees, coconuts and cashew.

Balli Jaswal Kaur is the author of the novels Inheritance, Sugarbread, Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows and The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters. Jaswal’s work has won her the Sydney Morning Herald’s 2014 Best Young Australian Novelist Award and shortlisted her for the 2015 Epigram Books Fiction Prize and the 2018 Singapore Literature Prize. Her short fiction and non-fiction writing have appeared in the UK Sunday Express, Cosmopolitan Magazine, The New York Times, Harpers Bazaar, Conde Nast Traveller and Best Australian Short Stories, among other publications and periodicals. She has travelled widely to appear in international writers festivals to conduct workshops and lectures on creative writing, pursuing an artistic career, the power of storytelling, global citizenship and social justice advocacy through literature.

Born in Lipulalongo, a small village of clove growers in Central Sulawesi, Erni Aladjai earned her degree in French literature from the Hasannudin University in Makassar, Sulawesi. She has worked as a journalist in Makassar, was also a news editor, and managed a learning institution. Erni is currently a full time writer and a freelance fiction editor. Local as well as national media have published several of her poems, essays, and short stories. Her novel, Kei, took first place in the 2011 Jakarta Arts Council novel competition. Other award-winning works include “Sampo Soie Soe, Si Juru Masak” at the 2012 Jakarta International Literary Festival. Her two novellas, Rumah Perahu and Sebelum Hujan di Seasea, took second and third place in the 2011 Sayembara Cerber Femina. Erni is also the author of the novels Pesan Cinta dari Hujan (Insist Press, 2010) and Ning di Bawah Gerhana (Bumen Pustaka Emas, 2013).

Glenn Diaz’s first book The Quiet Ones (Ateneo Press) won the 2017 Palanca Grand Prize and the Philippine National Book Award. His work, including short fiction, poetry, and criticism, has been published in the US, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines. He is a recipient of fellowships and residencies in Bangalore, New York, and Jakarta, among others. Born and raised in Manila, he is currently pursuing doctoral studies at the University of Adelaide in South Australia, where he is at work on his second book.

Hafiz Hamzah is a poet and essayist. He is the founder of Obscura Malaysia, an independent publisher and bookseller, and the editor-in-chief of Svara Journal, a Malay-language publication focusing on Malaysian arts and culture. His works include the poetry collection Blooms of Ire (2019, Tintabudi Publishing), as well as the essay collection BOR: Lima Esei (2018, Obscura).

Kyoko Yoshida was born and raised in Munakata (Fukuoka Pref.) on the Sea of Genkai in Japan, went to college and graduate school in Kyoto, studied creative writing in Milwaukee at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and taught in the port cities of Yokohama and Tokyo. In 2014, her first collection of short stories, Disorientalism, came out from Vagabond Press in Sydney. Her short stories in English have been published in various journals including Chelsea, Beloit Fiction Review, Cream City Review, Massachusetts Review, and Western Humanities Review. She translates Japanese contemporary experimental poetry and drama. Kiwao Nomura’s Spectacle & Pigsty (OmniDawn, 2011), a co-translation with poet Forrest Gander, won the 2012 Best Translated Book Award in Poetry in the US and the 2012 Toson Memorial Rekitei Award in Japan. Her other fields of interest include contemporary fiction in English and cultural representation of American baseball and its transpacific exchanges in the 1920s and ‘30s.

Marylyn Tan is a linguistics graduate, poet, and artist interested in conditions of alienation and marginalisation. She has performed at the Singapore Biennale, the Singapore Writers Festival, SPEAK., and she has also been featured in various print anthologies. Gaze Back is her first published book and won the 2020 Singapore Literature Prize for English Poetry.

Shokofeh Azar was born in Iran in 1972, just 7 years before the Islamic revolution. Shokoofeh’s early interest in writing and art was sparked by her father who was an Iranian intellectual, artist, author and poet. Her last book, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree was published in 2017 by Wild Dingo press, and shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, the 2018 Stella Prize and the 2018 Queensland University Fiction Award. Reviews, interviews and profiles have appeared in the Age, the Australian, The Australian Book Review, ABC National Radio, the Western Australian, The Guardian, The Independent and more. She continues her writing and is also gaining a reputation as an artist, with a number of successful exhibitions. Now she is living with her daughter and her foster daughter at Victoria.

Sumudu Samarawickrama is from Werribee. Her work has appeared in Boston Review, TLB, Meanjin and Overland. Her first chapbook, Utter the Thing: deciBels 3 is published by Vagabond Press. Sumudu is part of FCAC’s West Writer’s Group, and is writing a collection of surrealistic sci-fi.