Pung awarded Creative Australia Fellowship for literature

Writer Alice Pung is the recipient of the 2023 Creative Australia Fellowship for literature.

Pung’s writing ‘has focused on people living on the margins—pregnant teenagers, illiterate mothers, poorer Australians and genocide survivors’, and her books have been widely studied, with inclusions on VCE and HSC study lists. Pung has written in multiple categories and genres. Her first adult novel, One Hundred Days (Black Inc.), was shortlisted for the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award, with the screen rights sold to author and screenwriter Michelle Law earlier this year.

Creative Australia said: ‘Alice is a mother as well as a lawyer and, until now, her writing practice has been “in addition” to her work and carer responsibilities.’ Her literature fellowship project, a novel manuscript called ‘Super Vision’, will engage with ‘an important and underrepresented topic—working mothers’. ‘The cumulation of her workplace expertise, life experience, public platform and personal insight will yield a work that will hopefully be enduring and significant; and perhaps even change the national conversation about how we value certain “caring” work,’ Creative Australia said.

Creative Australia awarded nine fellowships, each worth $80,000 over two years, across a number of areas. The fellowships are open to established artists to ‘support creativity and professional development’. The full list of 2023 recipients is available on the Creative Australia website.

Photo credit: Courtney Brown.

Category: Awards Local news