Alice Pung

Alice Pung’s first book, Unpolished Gem (2006), won the Australian Book Industry Newcomer of the Year Award and was shortlisted in the Victorian and NSW Premiers’ Literary awards. It was published in the UK and USA in separate editions and has been translated into several languages including Italian, German and Indonesian.

Alice’s next book, Her Father’s Daughter (2011), won the Western Australia Premier’s Award for Non-Fiction and was shortlisted for the Victorian and NSW Premiers’ Literary awards and the Queensland Literary Awards. Her latest book is Laurinda (2014)

Alice also edited the collection Growing Up Asian in Australia (2008) and her writing has appeared in the Monthly, The Age, and The Best Australian Stories and The Best Australian Essays. Her series of children's books, 'Meet Marly' from the Our Australian Girl series were published in 2015.

Reading Australia: 'The Divine Wind' by Garry Disher

Reading Australia • 02 November 2016

A generation living in peacetime is inclined to devalue the identity and place of soldiers. In Australia, active soldiers have been maligned as meddlesome interlopers in foreign affairs (if they are our soldiers) or combatant terrorists (if they are not). In his book Secret Men’s Business (1998), John Marsden wrote that going to war used to be seen as a marker of adulthood. We forget that war wa ... (read more)