2024/25 Shanghai Western Sydney Writing Exchange Recipients Announced
The Shanghai Writing Program, a prestigious two-month international residency in Shanghai, China is held in conjunction with Western Sydney University and runs from September to October each year. This program began in 2008 and has since hosted writers from over 30 countries.
The exchange was open to students, staff and alumni from Western Sydney University as well as alumni from Varuna, the National Writers’ House. As this is a reciprocal fellowship, Varuna and Western Sydney University will also be welcoming a writer from the Shanghai Writers’ Association to stay in residence at Varuna and to present at the University.
We’re pleased to announce that the selected Shanghai Writers’ Association recipient is Yu Shi and the Australian recipient is Rachel Hennessy.
Yu Shi will travel to Australia this year (2024) and take part in this year’s Blue Mountains Writers’ Festival. She will visit WSU’s Institute for Australian and Chinese Arts and Culture (IAC) and meet postgraduate writers in the Writing and Society Research Centre (WSRC). Rachel Hennessy will travel to Shanghai in 2025.
Congratulations to both writers on being selected, we can’t wait to see what you work on during your residencies.
Yu Shi is a writer, translator and reporter living in Shanghai. She graduated with a degree in International Chinese from ECNU in 1998, and has published several novels, novelettes and collections of essays since 2002. Yu has published more than 30 books of translations from English to Chinese, including The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson, Hand to Mouth by Paul Auster, The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor, The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima by Henry Scott Stokes, and Duma Key, Dark Tower VII and Doctor Sleep by Stephen King. As a reporter, her book reviews and interviews can be seen in Bazzar, Modern Weekend and other major media outlets in China. Since 2020, Yu has hosted TiaoDao FM, a popular podcast focused on literature and writers. She also hosts and produces another podcast PingPongFM, focused on films adapted from books, with her friend JingFei, who is an expert on Film History.
Her latest novel One and Only is the first novel written about people living on the Autism spectrum in the Chinese literature world.
Dr Rachel Hennessy is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne. She is the award-winning author of five novels: The Quakers (2008), The Heaven I Swallowed (2013), River Stone (2019), Mountain Arrow (2020) and City Knife (2023). Her first novel was winner of the Adelaide Festival’s Best Unpublished Manuscript Award, long-listed for The Australian/Vogel Literary Award, shortlisted for the Varuna Writers Centre Manuscript Development Program and winner of the ArtsSA prize for Creative Writing. Her second novel was Runner Up in The Australian/Vogel Literary Award and long listed for the Nita B Kibble Award.
Rachel’s short fiction have been published in various anthologies including: Scorchers: A Climate Fiction Anthology; Small City Tales of Strangeness and Beauty; Emerge: New Australian Writing; On Edge and The Body. She has also had nonfiction and academic work published in TEXT: The Journal of Writing and Writing Programs, New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing,Overland, Kill Your Darlings, The Lifted Brow and Daily Life. She is a manuscript assessor for Writers Victoria and has been an assessor on the Literature panel of Creative Victoria and the Australia Council. She lives in Melbourne.
