Writing and Society Research Centre

Australian Participants

David Walker is Alfred Deakin Professor of Australian Studies at Deakin University, Victoria. His influential and critically-acclaimed book, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850 to 1939 has been translated into Chinese and Hindi and published in an English edition in India by SSS Publications, New Delhi. He has recently co-edited with Agnieszka Sobocinska, Australia’s Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century, University of Western Australia Publishing, 2012. His recent memoir, Not Dark Yet: a personal history (2011) examines sight, memory and the writing of history while also exploring some unexpected family connections to Asia. Not Dark Yet is now being translated into Chinese by Professor Li Yao. David Walker is a Visiting Professor in the School of Foreign Studies at Renmin University of China and from 2013 will take up the inaugural BHP Billiton Chair of Australian Studies at Peking University, Beijing.

Brian Castro was educated at the University of Sydney and has worked in Australian, French and Hong Kong universities as a teacher and writer. He is the author of nine novels and a volume of essays on writing and culture. His novels have won a number of state and national prizes including the Australian/Vogel Literary Award, The Age Fiction Prize, the National Book Council Prize for Fiction, four Victorian Premier's awards, two NSW Premier's awards and the Queensland Premier's Award for Fiction. He has delivered keynote addresses at major conferences in Shanghai, Vienna, Paris, Toulouse, Hong Kong and Kyoto. He has been a Literature Board member on the Australia Council. For many years he was the literary reviewer for Asiaweek magazine. In 2006 he held the position of Macgeorge Fellow at the University of Melbourne. In 2007-8 he was the Professorial Research Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne. He is currently Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide.

Nicholas Jose is an Australian author best-known for his fiction and cultural essays. His seven novels and two collections of short stories include Paper Nautilus, The Red Thread and Original Face. His acclaimed memoir Black Sheep: Journey to Borroloola appeared in 2002. He was general editor of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (2009) and has written widely on contemporary Australian and Asian art and literature. In 2002-05 he was President of Sydney PEN. He was Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University, 2009-10, and is an adjunct professor with the Writing and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney. He was Chair of Creative Writing at The University of Adelaide 2005-08, where he is now Professor of English and Creative Writing.

Ivor Indyk is founding editor and publisher of HEAT magazine and the award-winning Giramondo book imprint, and Whitlam Professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney. His current research projects include the history of Australian literary publishing and the expression of emotion in Australian literature, with a particular interest in Patrick White, and such concepts as awkwardness, shyness, embarrassment and wonder. Important Australian authors published by him at Giramondo include Alexis Wright (winner of the Miles Franklin Award), Brian Castro, Gerald Murnane, Nicholas Jose, Judith Beveridge, Jennifer Maiden, Robert Gray, Gig Ryan, Beverley Farmer and Antigone Kefala. A critic, essayist and reviewer, he has written a monograph on David Malouf for Oxford University Press, and essays on many aspects of Australian literature, art, architecture and publishing. Ivor Indyk’s areas of postgraduate supervision include literary publishing, literary criticism, Australian literature, creative non-fiction, fiction and poetry.

Anthony Uhlmann is the author of Beckett and Poststructuralism (Cambridge UP, 1999) and Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image (Cambridge UP, 2006) and co-editer of The Ethics of Arnold Geulincx with Han van Ruler and Martin Wilson (among other books). His main research interests concern the interrelation of literature and philosophy, and the nature of literary form. He is just completing a project examining Modernist Aesthetics, focusing on the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov. He is President of the Australasian Association for Literature (opens in a new window), and the Chief Editor of the Journal of Beckett Studies (opens in a new window)

J M Coetzee is a novelist and literary critic as well as a translator. He has won many awards throughout his career. His novel Waiting for the Barbarians was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and he is three-times winner of the CNA Prize. Age of Iron was awarded the Sunday Express Book of the Year award, and The Master of Petersburg was awarded the Irish Times International Fiction Prize in 1995. He has also won the French Prix Femina Étranger, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and the 1987 Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society. He was the first author to be awarded the Booker Prize twice: for Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and for Disgrace (1999). In 2003 Coetzee receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in 2005 was awarded the Order of Mapungubwe (gold class) by the South African government for his "exceptional contribution in the field of literature and for putting South Africa on the world stage." J.M. Coetzee is a Professor of Literature at the University of Adelaide.

Gail Jones is the author of two short-story collections, a critical monograph, and the novels Black Mirror, Sixty Lights, Dreams of Speaking and Sorry. Shortlisted three times for the Miles Franklin Award, her prizes include the WA Premier's Award for Fiction, the Nita B. Kibble Award, the Steele Rudd Award, the Age Book of the Year Award, the Adelaide Festival Award for Fiction and the ASAL Gold Medal. She has also been shortlisted for international awards, including the IMPAC and the Prix Femina. Her fiction has been translated into nine languages. Before coming to UWS Gail worked in the Department of English at the University of Western Australia. In 2001 she received the Australian Universities Teaching Award for Humanities and the Arts.Her academic interests are in narrative, cinema, cultural studies, contemporary literature and Australian literature.