In August of this year, we presented Liminal Festival in partnership with The Wheeler Centre. Together, we contemplated and unsettled the function of language in the culture around us. Now, we invite you to enter the space once more through responses and recordings. In creating this archive of gathering, we challenge the illusion that an event truly ends. Instead, it continues in memory and documentation, expanding and thrumming through ripples. Read more →
2025 Liminal x Hyphenated projects writing fellowship
The Liminal x Hyphenated Projects Writing Fellowship offers an early-career writer the opportunity to undertake a self-directed residency at Hyphenated Projects, with a stipend of $1500.
Running for the third time, this fellowship is the only writing residency offered specifically to Asian Australian writers on this continent. We welcome applications from writers of all genres; previous winners include nonfiction writer Jinghua Qian (2020) and poet Shastra Deo (2024).
learn more and apply here →
Slow Currents at the Asian American Literature Festival
September 14—22, 2024
Join us for the 2024 Asian American Literature Festival, a historic multi-city gathering designed to support and nurture Asian American literature and the literary community. The Slow Currents International Writing Workshop presents three conversations produced across Aotearoa, Australia and America.
Join poets Hasib Hourani and Cathy Linh Che for Writing into Silence, a conversation between poets Hasib Hourani + Cathy Linh Che about writing into the wound, explorations with form, and the state of literature in Australia and the US.
Saraid de Silva and Gowri Koneswaran discuss grief, rage, and writing across Sri Lanka’s diaspora in Violence, Justice + Ghosts.
Make your Best Bets with Chris Tse and Panda Wong, the first (ever!) Asian diaspora editors of Best New Zealand Poems and Best of Australian Poems.
Find out more at asianamericanliteraturefestival.org/
Interviews
"If the empire crushes Palestine, no one wins—we’re all doomed. Which is why when we say ‘A free Palestine frees the world’, it is because a free Palestine frees the world. That’s why this fight is so important."
“Being who I am, namely Australian Chinese and female—two distinct drawbacks in mid-20th-century Australia, especially in the small apple isle of Tasmania—I grew up totally outside the norm in white assimilationist Australia, when those with non-Anglo-Celtic backgrounds were expected to merge with the majority and forget their own cultural backgrounds.”
“Writers seem to come into their literary prime, so to speak, later than other artists because it can take time and long years of lived experience to create something fresh and moving on the page.”
“Art is expressed in so many different ways and forms—you’re wearing a piece of art when you’re wearing my silk, but I see it as more of a design that’s made from pieces of art.”
“Working in telly, it’s astonishing how much writers’ rooms feel like the engine rooms of cultural production—whose stories we [decide to] tell determines whose humanity we value. I think the centrality of cis straight white characters in our major narratives facilitates a grave dearth of empathy in this colony.”
“So much of what we live is complicated or conflicted, and based in feeling, and not in words. Language allows us to get very close to saying what we mean, but to me it always falls just short.”
“This is why I always urge emerging writers to enter as many competitions as they can. I think competitions are a great entryway into the industry.”
“Neoliberalism has generalised this tendency by accentuating the ideology of ‘new beginnings’, and thus the self-made social subject that goes hand in hand with it: someone with brilliant ideas that come to them as if from nowhere and who is always ready to initiate something original and ‘revolutionary’.”
“I’ve always had a dispute with narration, since it traps the reader in immersion, like a drowning dragonfly. (Are writers part of the entertainment industry? Are books pastimes?)”
“I am interested in what people will do to propel themselves into wealth, luxury and excess—especially if you possess none of it but believe it to be your birthright.”
“I am averse to the idea of a conventional-looking facade and simplified visual emulation of historical language. I am not too interested in what the image ‘looks’ like; I am more focused on how a complex thought can be represented through methods learnt from an existing long-established practice of painting.”
“This debut show is something of a coming-of age-story, a personal renaissance. The realisation that I had the magic within myself all along.”
"I think of hope in the same way I think of utopia: it’s not a fixed position, its very essence comes from the fact that we are always striving for better."
Notes
Playlist
“Questions surrounding belonging and identity are clearly present, especially if one finds themselves caught between cultures. Where do we find the bridge? And if one does appear, what does it look like to cross?”
“tiny shiny beautiful” is a six-song tapestry invoking the rare feeling of seeing earth in a new light by Melbourne-based pop artist, composer and producer Ivoris.