Copyright Agency extends WrICE funding until 2017

The Copyright Agency Cultural Fund has announced it will continue its funding of RMIT University’s Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange (WrICE) program until 2017. 

The new $225,000 funding ‘will enable 15 established, early-career and emerging Australian writers to be awarded WrICE fellowships over the next three years,’ said the Copyright Agency and RMIT in a statement.

The inaugural WrICE program funded five Australian writers to travel to events in Penang and Singapore in February 2014 and meet with six writers from the Asia-Pacific region.

Melissa Lucashenko, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Jennifer Down, Amarlie Foster and Harriet McKnight were the inaugural WrICE fellows.

Lucashenko said the program was ‘explicitly about bringing Asian and Australian writers together’, meaning that ‘race, culture and language—which are so often potential barriers and difficulties—instead became an essential focus of our daily conversations about writing’.

The 2015 fellows ‘will join writers from across the Asia-Pacific at collaborative residencies and public events in Melbourne, Vietnam, the Philippines and China’, said the statement. The first event will be held in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in collaboration with RMIT Vietnam in 2015.

WrICE writers will appear at the Wheeler Centre as part of the 2014 Melbourne Writers Festival.