Time, Love, Earth: Voices & Visions across the Asia-Pacific

Join us for a night of performance, poetry and story from writers and scholars from the Asia Pacific region. A powerful ensemble of voices exploring what earth, time and love means to them.    

Hear from Ali Cobby Eckermann, Alvin Pang, David Carlin, Dicky Senda, Eugenia Flynn, Francesca Rendle-Short, Hsu-Ming Teo, Lily Rose Topé, Priya Surukkai Chabria, Marjorie Evasco, Melody Ellis, Michelle Aung Thin, Michele Lee and Roanna Gonsalves at this special event that promises to be provocative, joyful and moving. 

Presented by RMIT Culture and non/fictionLab, in partnership with WrICE. Part of the 2024 Connecting Asia-Pacific Literary Cultures Symposium.  

This event was produced as part of the Australian Research Council Discovery Project, Connecting Asia-Pacific Literary Cultures: Grounds for Ethical Encounter and Exchange, with funding from the Australian Government.

Image credit: Smoking Ceremony as Welcome to Country by members of the Bunurong Land Council Aboriginal Corporation at the McCraith House, Dromana, Mornington Peninsula, Victoria, Australia, WrICE Indonesia residency 2018, image Ali Barker.

Featured Artists:

Ali Cobby Eckermann is a Yankunytjatjara woman born on Kaurna land in South Australia. Ali received a Deadly Award for outstanding contribution to Indigenous Literature in 2012, and the winner of many other prizes including the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and Book of the Year award at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for Ruby Moonlight, a massacre verse novel (2013), the prestigious Windham Campbell Award for Poetry from Yale University, USA (2017), and was the first Aboriginal Australian writer to attend the International Writing Program at University of Iowa. She is an Adjunct Professor at RMIT University.

Alvin Pang is a poet, writer, editor and translator whose broad creative practice spans over two decades of literary and related activities in Singapore and elsewhere. His latest titles include WHAT HAPPENED: Poems 1997-2017 (2017) and UNINTERRUPTED TIME (2019). For his contributions to the literary arts, he has received Singapore's Young Artist of the Year Award, the Singapore Youth Award and the JCCI Education Award, among other accolades. In 2020, he completed a PhD in writing with RMIT University.

David Carlin is a Professor of Creative Writing at RMIT University, Australia. His books include the collaboratively authored The After-Normal (2019) and 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder (2019), as well as Our Father Who Wasn’t There (2010) and The Abyssinian Contortionist (2015). He has co-edited volumes including A-Z of Creative Writing Methods (2023), The Near and the Far, Vol 1&2 (2016 and 2019), and Performing Digital (2015). David is co-President of the NonfictioNOW Conference, and co-founder of the WrICE Asia-Pacific Collaborative Residency program and the non/fictionLab research group.

Dicky Senda is a writer and food activist from Mollo, South Central Timor, Indonesia. Has published a poetry compilation Cerah Hati (2011), a collection of short stories Kanuku Leon (2013), Hau Kamelin & Tuan Kamlasi (2015) and Sai Rai(2017). He was invited to the Makassar International Writers Festival (2013), Bienal Sastra Salihara (2015), Asean Literary Festival 2016, Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2017 and Melbourne Writers Festival 2018. Now lives in Taiftob village in the mountains of Mollo, South Central Timor and together with the community in his village, he initiated Skol Tamolok, a critical and contextual education model for indigenous people, the Apinat-Aklahat residency program and the Mnahat Fe’u Heritage Trailer, a gastronomic tour program.

Eugenia Flynn is Vice Chancellor’s Indigenous Postdoctoral Fellow in Writing and Publishing at the School of Media and Communication, RMIT University. Eugenia’s research has a primary focus on Indigenous literature and sits at the intersection between literary studies, creative writing, and critical Indigenous studies. Her work has been published in  NITV, Peril magazine, IndigenousX, The Lifted Brow, Borderless: A Transnational Anthology of Feminist Poetry and #MeToo: Stories From the Australian Movement. Eugenia is an Aboriginal (Larrakia and Tiwi), Chinese Malaysian and Muslim woman who grew up on Kaurna land in Adelaide and now lives and works on Kulin country in Melbourne.

Francesca Rendle-Short is an award-winning novelist, memoirist and essayist. She is a writer and researcher interested in the affordances of language in/when writing the body, prepositional and queer thinking, ethical enquiry, the value of collaboration and community building, and trans-national literatures and literary practices. Her books include The Near and the Far (Vol I and II; Scribe Publications) and Bite Your Tongue (Spinifex Press). She is co-editor of A-Z of Creative Writing Methods (Bloomsbury) and is co-founder of the non/fictionLab research group and WrICE (Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange).

Hsu-Ming Teo is the Head of the Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language, and Literature at Macquarie University, Australia, where she teaches literature and creative writing. Her academic publications include Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels  (2012), The Popular Culture of Romantic Love in Australia  (ASP 2017), Cultural History in Australia (UNSW 2003), and The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction (2020). Her first novel, Love and Vertigo (2000), won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award and her second novel Behind the Moon (2005) was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.  

Lily Rose Topé is Professorial Lecturer and former Department Head of the Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of the Philippines, Diliman. She has a PhD from the National University of Singapore. She is author of (Un)Framing Southeast Asia: Nationalism and the Post Colonial Text in English in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines and co-editor of An Anthology of English Writing from Southeast Asia. She has written various articles on Southeast Asian literature in English, Asian literature in translation, Philippine Chinese literature and Philippine literature in English.

Priya Sarukkai Chabria is an award-winning poet, writer, translator and curator of eleven books, including four poetry collections, two SF novels, translations from Classical Tamil, literary nonfiction, a novel, and two poetry anthologies. Winner, Muse India Translation Prize, Kitaab Experimental Story Award, Best Reads from Feminist Press. Awarded by the Indian government for Outstanding Contribution to Literature. Founding Editor, Poetry at Sangam, she’s on the Advisory Council of G100, India, and WrICE.

Marjorie Evasco is a SEAWRITE 2010 and National Commission for Culture and the Arts Ani ng Dangal awardee, whose books have won the National Book Awards for poetry, oral history, biography, and art. She received the Writers’ Union of the Philippines (UMPIL) Pambansang Alagad Balagtas award for poetry in 2004; the Patnubay ng Sining at Kalinangan for literature from the City of Manila in 2005; the Outstanding Silliman University alumna award for creative writing in 2008; and the 2011 Carlos P. Garcia award for literature from Bohol, her home-island. She is a University Fellow and Professor Emeritus of Literature of De La Salle University, Manila. 

Melody Ellis is a writer and creative practice researcher based in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University where she is a member of the non/fictionLab research group. Melody is interested in the politics of value and taste, power, interpretation, subjectivity, and resistance. She brings to her writing and thinking a rigorous engagement with critical theory, art, aesthetics, and collaborative arts practices.

Michelle Aung Thin is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Media and Communication where she teaches in Communication and Advertising. She researches writing that deals with intercultural and cross-cultural experiences as well as how to write ethically about difference. Her critically acclaimed first novel, The Monsoon Bride (Text 2011), was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier Literary Awards as an unpublished manuscript. Her latest novel, Hasina (Allen & Unwin 2019), was released as Crossing the Farak River (Annick, 2020) in the USA and Canada where it won the Freeman as well as an USBBY - Outstanding International Book. 

Michele Lee is a multiple award-winning and critically acclaimed Hmong-Australian writer, known for her sharp ear and wit, creating character-driven stories often from the perspectives of imperfect women. Across stage, audio and live art, her works include Rice (2022, 2021, 2017), Security (2022), Single Ladies (2021), Going Down (2018), The Naked Self (2018, 2016), Talon Salon (2014, 2013, 2012) and See How The Leaf People Run (2012). For screen, Michele wrote on TV shows Hungry Ghosts (2020) and Retrograde (2020), and wrote two 6 x 2-minute stories released on TikTok (2022). Her sex-romp memoir Banana Girl (2013) is published by Transit Lounge. 

Roanna Gonsalves  is the author of The Permanent Resident (UWAP) published in India and South Asia as Sunita De Souza Goes To Sydney (Speaking Tiger).  The book won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award Multicultural Prize 2018 and was longlisted for the Dobbie Literary Award 2018. Her four-part radio series On the tip of a billion tongues, commissioned and broadcast by ABC RN’s Earshot program, is a portrayal of contemporary India through its multilingual writers. She is a recipient of the Prime Minister’s Australia Asia Endeavour Award and is co-founder co-editor of Southern Crossings. She is a recipient of The Bridge Awards’ inaugural Varuna – Cove Park Writing Residency 2019 in Scotland, and was part of the Australia Council for the Arts’ India Literature Exploratory delegation 2020. She works as a Lecturer in Creative Writing at UNSW Sydney.