Public projects & programs
Listen to writers discuss their process.
Explore the intersection of theory and practice with artists examining race, gender and sexuality through a critical lens. Uncover the youthful writings of well-known authors.
The School of the Arts and Media hosts a number of projects and programs open to the public. We invite you to join us.
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Launched in 2018, Live Crossings is made up of a network of creative practitioners working together to generate new forms of expression, critique, and social dialogue. We strive to develop alternative ways to pursue questions about differences and diversity.
Live Crossings is run by the UNSW School of the Arts & Media and supported by UNSW Creative Practice Lab. We bring together established and emerging figures from a range of different fields and community contexts to produce new, creative work around the pressing social questions of sovereignty, migration, refugees, and cultural dislocation.
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Based in Australia, we have a local focus but also look at points of connection and a wider dialogue. We approach these questions through the critical lens provided by ongoing debates and activism around race, gender and sexuality. We feature the work of Indigenous, refugee and diasporic writers, artists and performers, and provide an opportunity for diverse practitioners to lead debates.
Live Crossings takes the statement by refugee writer Behrouz Boochani, regarding the importance of literary expression as its model for public and creative debate:
I congratulate you on all that you've achieved in those 40 years, on the reputation you've built, the relationships you've fostered and the positive social impact that drives your work. Long may you continue to advance social justice in our community.
- “For Six Months I was Jesus” in They Cannot Take the Sky: Stories From Detention ed Michael Green, André Dao et al., 2017
Boochani’s compelling insight is that literary language is fundamental to the expression of difficult truths and that creativity can ground social and political transformation. Literary language is not confined to print, or to writing or speaking in English. We aim to include work in diverse languages, including Indigenous languages. We also focus on questions of translation and aim to create points of dialogue across different media and performance platforms, which is achieved through live events that mark the launch of each issue.
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Live Crossings invites guest editor-curators to envisage and compile work from a range of creative practitioners working across different languages. The distinguished Community Cultural Development worker Paula Abood and Indigenous poet, activist and critic Evelyn Araluen produced the first issue. The editor-curators also hold workshops for writers and performers to work together on content, themes, and protocols for each issue.
As a project, Live Crossings draws on UNSW’s strong international profile in Australian Literature, particularly in contemporary writing, Indigenous and refugee writing, and women writers. It develops substantial and long-lasting forms of social and community engagement that will help lead the debate on fundamental issues and challenges.
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- Brigitta Olubas
- Ramaswami Harindranath
- Elizabeth McMahon
- Tanja Dreher
- Roanna Gonsalves
- Caroline Wake
- Zora Simic
- Laetitia Nanquette
- Paula Abood
- Paul MatthewsOmid Tofighian
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Connecting Writers, Publishers and Students
UNSWriting brings together the flow of ideas and high calibre writing and connects writers, publishers and students through special events, workshops and public talks. Immerse yourself in the writing community with our regular events, or catch up on past events with our podcasts. We’re here to keep you in the loop.
Director of UNSWriting
Dr Stephanie Bishop
Email: stephanie.bishop@unsw.edu.auSign up to our mailing list
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We are postponing our 2020/21 events. We hope to see everyone soon. Keep reading. Keep writing. All the best from us at UNSWriting.
P.S. Review our past events below for some eye opening, brain tingling interviews...
Juvenilia Press
The Juvenilia Press publishes early works by known writers such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, and Malcolm Lowry. The attractive little books that emerge provide a window on the writer's development and engaging glimpses of the young genius at work.
The Juvenilia Press involves students in the work of editing, annotating and illustrating, under the supervision of established scholars. The Press is proud to showcase this work. Student essays on the editing and publication process, as well as collections of volume illustrations, can be accessed from the links at left.
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The Books
Each volume of the Juvenilia Press series, besides the text by the young author, includes light-hearted illustration, scholarly annotation, and an introduction that relates this work to the author's mature writing. Students both graduate and undergraduate contribute largely to this series, working under the direction of established specialists in the area.
"An ingenious scholarly and pedagogical undertaking." - G.B. Tennyson, Nineteenth-Century Literature
Scholarship and the Press
Juvenilia Press publications are scholarly volumes that receive full credit in universities as academic publications in assessments of grant reporting. Not only are they peer-reviewed by international specialists in relevant fields of expertise, but they are also reviewed in scholarly journals, such as Nineteenth-Century Literature, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Canadian Children's Literature, Text, Canadian Studies in English, and Romantic Studies. We have received recognition for our editing work in the Times Literary Supplement, where in a front-page review on Alexander and McMaster the reviewer (Professor Dinah Birch) speaks of "the quiet work of the Juvenilia Press" (TLS, 10 February 2006, p. 3). It is "quiet" because we do not advertise in the usual way or make money from our publications, apart from covering costs. Juvenilia Press is hosted by universities (in Canada and Australia to date) and supported by research grants.
Pedagogy and the Press
The Juvenilia Press was originally conceived as a university/classroom project. While it has grown well beyond those limits, pedagogy remains at the core of its mandate. Students are involved in every volume in some capacity, whether that be writing introductions, researching annotations, learning the importance of textual editing, drawing illustrations, or developing a book's layout and design. Working under the guidance of established international scholars, they gain invaluable experience, practical skills, and publication.
The Seventh International Literary Juvenilia Conference
This conference will be held at UNSW Sydney from Wednesday 18 May to Saturday 21 May 2022.
Following the success of the 2018 conference on ‘Minority Voices’ at St. John’s College, University of Durham, the International Society of Literary Juvenilia (ISLJ) and Juvenilia Press, welcome you to UNSW Sydney for a conference to discuss:
Literary Juvenilia, material imagination and ‘things’
Young writers ranging from Pope, Chatterton and Burns in the eighteenth century, to Austen, the Brontës, Eliot and Dickens in the nineteenth, and Edith Wharton, C.S. Lewis, Judith Wright, Margaret Atwood, and J.K. Rowling in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have found inspiration and example in the everyday context of their writing practice—in a materiality related to their physical, social and cultural worlds and in the material conditions of their play, learning, imitation and critique. This conference will explore the material culture of juvenilia (youthful writing up to the age of twenty): the relationship between ‘things’ and literary imagination and practice.
The conference aims to provide a broad intellectual forum for academics, postgraduates, members of literary societies and the interested public.
There will be a panel dedicated to the juvenilia of the Brontës, especially that of Anne Brontë to acknowledge her 2020 Bicentenary, sponsored by the Australian Brontë Association.