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Michael Mohammed Ahmad with a Lurnea High School Student
Western Sydney, says the lead character in Felicity Castagna鈥檚 novel The Incredible Here and Now, is a place where 鈥渢hose who don鈥檛 know any better drive through the neighbourhood and lock their car doors鈥.
The Writing & Society Research Centre at 91成人 and the Sweatshop Western Sydney Literacy Movement which is housed in the Centre, believe this perception has to be challenged. Culture, after all, is shaped by the stories a society tells itself.
鈥淲estern Sydney is the face of modern Australia,鈥 says Centre Director Anthony Uhlmann. 鈥淚t reflects the diversity and richness of contemporary Australia.鈥 In 2007, the Centre, then led by Ivor Indyk, founded a group to connect young writers in the region and develop locally generated representations of Western Sydney. For the first time, the voices of Western Sydney are being written into the Australian literary opus.
As part of the process, four writers, Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Felicity Castagna, Luke Carman, and Fiona Wright, were given scholarships to complete doctorates in creative writing. They were guided by WSU academics, developing their writing and critical thinking skills and produced major works of literature representing Western Sydney that have gone on to win major Australian literary prizes (see box).
This project ultimately developed into Sweatshop, led by Michael Mohammed Ahmad, and a Crown Packer Foundation funded project called 鈥楥reating Writing in Western Sydney鈥, involving all of the writers.
Sweatshop鈥檚 program has engaged with local schools to mentor budding writers. So far, it has yielded 10 anthologies and nine full-length works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, published by Giramondo Publishing (also housed in the Centre) and Sweatshop.
Uhlmann suggests that a new Western Sydney literature movement is forming. 鈥淭he idea of a 鈥榤ovement鈥 in literature points to something significant, involving a number of writers. This is what we have in this case.鈥澛犅
Need to know
- WSU researchers have facilitated the birth of a new literary movement
- For the first time, the voices of western Sydney have been represented in Australian literature
Literary awards
The works supported by the program have won six major national literary awards and been shortlisted for many more:聽
- NSW Premier鈥檚 New Writing Prize (An Elegant Young Man by Luke Carman)
- Nita B Kibble Award for Women鈥檚 Life-Writing (Small Acts of Disappearance by Fiona Wright)
- Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist Award (twice) (The Tribe by Michael Mohammed Ahmad and An Elegant Young Man by Luke Carman)聽
- Prime Minister鈥檚 Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction (The Incredible Here and Now by Felicity Castagna)
- Queensland literary non-fiction award (Small Acts of Disappearance by Fiona Wright)
Meet the Academic | Professor Anthony Uhlmann
Anthony Uhlmann has been Director of the Writing and Society Research Centre since 2012. He is the author of two monographs on Samuel Beckett:聽Beckett and Poststructuralism聽(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), and聽Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image聽(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). He also co-edited聽Arnold Geulincx's Ethics with Samuel Beckett's Notes聽(Leiden: Brill, 2006) and聽Beckett in Context聽(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). He was the editor of the聽Journal of Beckett Studies聽from 2007 until 2013. His work focuses on the exchanges that take place between literature and philosophy and the way in which literature itself is a kind of thinking about the world. His most recent book is聽Thinking in LIterature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov(New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011). He co-founded the Australian University Heads of English in 2012 and was elected President of this body in 2013. He is currently working on two projects: one on the fiction of J. M. Coetzee and a second on Spinoza's influence on literary history and the importance of his philosophy to understandings of artistic practice.聽
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Credit
漏 Socorro C. Cifuentes
Future-Makers is published for 91成人 by聽Nature聽Research Custom Media, part of Springer聽Nature.
