Alice Pung

Alice Pung is a writer, editor, teacher and lawyer based in Melbourne. Born a month after her Chinese parents fled from Cambodia to Australia as asylum seekers from Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge Regime, Alice has used her shared family’s experiences to write memoir and fiction. In 2007 she won Newcomer of the Year in the Australia Book Industry Awards for her first memoir Unpolished Gem. Her next book, Her Father’s Daughter, won the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award for Non Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Premier’s Literary Awards in Victoria and NSW. Laurinda, Alice’s first novel, won the Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelist of the Year Award. Alice’s writing has appeared in the Monthly, the Age, Meanjin, Best Australian Stories and Best Australian Essays. Alice edited Growing Up Asian in Australia, a collection of personal accounts, essays, short stories and poetry which is currently a set text for the VCE English context on Identity and Belonging. Alice lives with her husband at Janet Clarke Hall at the University of Melbourne, where she is currently the Artist in Residence.