Shanghai Western Sydney Exchange

Varuna the National Writers’ House, Shanghai Writers’ Association (SWA) and Western Sydney University are delighted to announce the inaugural winners of a new international residency exchange. The literary program is a collaboration involving Varuna, the SWA, the Writing & Society Research Centre (WSU) and the Australia China Institute for Arts and Culture (WSU).

 The two writers selected for this exchange program are novelist and WSU alumna Kristel Thornell and leading Chinese fiction writer and translator Zhou Jianing.

 Subject to ongoing travel restrictions, Kristel Thornell, award-winning Australian author, poet and essayist, will travel to Shanghai in September 2021 to spend two months in Shanghai as part of the Shanghai Writing Program. This annual event has hosted 69 writers from over 30 countries since it began in 2008, and approximately 12 international writers will visit Shanghai in 2021. Kristel will be working on her third novel while on the residency.

 In exchange, Varuna the National Writers’ House and Western Sydney University will welcome Zhou Jianing from Shanghai to spend a month in Australia across August 2021. Jianing will participate in the Blue Mountains Writers’ Festival, present new work in translation with ACIAC/W&SRC, and live with five other writers in residence at Varuna, Katoomba.

 Veechi Stuart, Executive Director of Varuna, comments: “Varuna is delighted to launch this new residency as part of our growing international exchange program. We look forward to welcoming Zhou Jianing here to Australia, and we are excited to support Kristel Thornell in this next stage of her writing career”. Dr Kate Fagan, Director of the Writing & Society Research Centre at WSU, says: “This exciting new residency hopes to give two outstanding young writers an opportunity to learn from one another’s literary communities and environments. The W&SRC and ACIAC have a long-standing commitment to supporting cross-cultural exchanges in literature and the arts.”

 Kristel Thornell has won many awards for her work, including the Australian/Vogel Literary Award, the Dobbie Award, the Barbara Ramsden Award and the University of Rochester's Andrew Eiseman Writers Award. Her novels Night Street and On the Blue Train are published by Allen & Unwin, and in 2019, On the Blue Train was released in a Chinese translation by Lijiang Publishing. Thornell holds an MA in English from the University of New Brunswick, and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Western Sydney. She is a regular participant in literary festivals around the world.

 Zhou Jianing is one of the most influential young writers in China. Since 2000, she has released five novels and three short story collections. Her latest release from June 2018 is a short story collection entitled Essential Beauty. Jianing is also a translator from English to Chinese, most recently Summertime by J M Coetzee. Her previous translation works include major English-language writers such as F Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor, Alice Munro and Joyce Carol Oates.

For more information about this program, see https://www.varuna.com.au/fellowships/shanghai

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