Past Programs
Immigration - 2008
Ouyang Yu's Kingsbury Tales
03/11/2008
Ouyang Yu is best known for his poetry, but has also written fiction and criticism in both English and Chinese.
Ouyang Yu came from China in 1991 after some years as a published poet, fiction and non-fiction writer and literary translator. He established and edited Otherland, Australia's first Chinese-English journal, and holds a PhD in Australian Literature from La Trobe University.
Translation, transformation and being between cultures are themes that Ouyang Yu often writes about and he has returned to these themes in his collection of poetry called The Kingsbury Tales.
The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon Read Transcript
18/07/2008
Born in 1964, Aleksandar Hemon grew up in Sarajevo, Bosnia, and became a journalist. In 1992 he travelled to America on a US-sponsored goodwill tour. His home city came under siege while he was in Chicago, where he stayed as a refugee. After a wide variety of low level, minimum wage jobs, he started writing in his second language, English, in 1995. His acclaimed collection of stories The Question of Bruno provoked comparisons with Conrad, Nabokov and Kundera when it appeared in 2000 and won several awards. His new book is The Lazarus Project. Aleksandar Hemon won one of the American MacArthur Foundation's famed 'genius grants' in 2004 to fund research for the book which is an exploration of immigration and identity.
Ali Alizadeh - The New Angel Read Transcript
14/07/2008
Imagine dreading having to sit a test at school the next day, then waking up in the morning to find all your prayers have been answered: your school has been destroyed in an air attack. This happened both to Iranian-born Australian author Ali Alizadeh and Bahram, the main character in his novel The New Angel.
It's the story of a young boy growing up in Tehran after the Iranian Islamic Revolution and in the midst of the bloody Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, and then having to deal with a new world when his family moves to Australia.
