Our multifaceted 2015 conference, Against the Grain, was hosted by the University of the Philippines and the Philippine National Commission for Arts and Culture. Some 140 writers from 16 countries took part. The event brought together emerging writers, creative writing teachers, literary agents, translators and publishers.
Award-winning
Filipino author, and teacher of creative writing, Jose Dalisay (Butch), gave the
opening keynote address, surprising some of the international delegates who
weren’t aware the Philippines has led the region in teaching creative writing. The
Philippines has held national annual writing workshops for at least 50 years.
Unlike most countries in Asia, the Philippines offers writing programmes from
the bachelor’s to the PhD level in several major universities.
Butch
spoke of “a new wave of writing produced by young, brash, and brilliant writers”
who are less connected to the Philippine’s old Spanish literature than to Japan’s
Haruki Murakami, and who look “less to newsprint than to Wattpad”. He said this
new literature “reaches deep into our rich trove of myths and mystic beliefs,
into our varied ethnolinguistic traditions”. He added it is being produced not
only in English but also in Filipino, and major regional languages.
Among the long-distance attendees was the director of the
creative writing programme at the University of Iceland, Rúnar Helgi Vignisson.
Kate Griffin, International Programme
Director at the British Centre for Literary Translation, came from the UK. She
said: “For me, Asia Pacific Writers and
Translators is four days of privileged access to different ways of thinking”. Qaisra Shahraz, whose novel The Holy Woman become a bestseller in
Indonesia and Turkey, also flew in from the UK, her current base. She deemed the
conference important for making connections in Asia, and said: “Since I joined five
years ago it’s something I look forward to every year.”
The poet Ravi Shankar flew in from the
USA, to run half a dozen writing master classes, offered at bargain prices! Ravi, founder of the electronic arts journal Drunken Boat and professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, said:
“APWT enables me to connect with
other writers from around the world, and that has proved remarkably important
because those sorts of conversations are simply not taking place, even in a
cosmopolitan city like New York. The relationships I’ve built with editors and
other writers have been instrumental in shaping my own aesthetics and my
sensibility and I don’t think I could have those experiences anywhere else. I
think this is a profoundly important organisation.”
For Indonesian
writer Eliza Vitri Handayani, APWT is indeed profoundly important. After reading
her fiction at an earlier APWT forum in Bangkok she was approached by Vagabond
Press. Handayani’s newly published novel, From Now On Everything Will Be Different, was launched at the Manila
conference. Vagabond has since published other APWT members spotted at the conferences,
including Japanese writer Kyoko Yoshida.
Singaporean residents who joined this year
included author Irene Cristalis (East Timor, A
Nation’s Bitter Dawn), Robin Hemley who is not only a director of
APWT but also director of the writing programme at
Yale-NUS College in Singapore, poet Aaron Lee who came with his new
collection Coastlands, S. Mickey Lin,
co-editor of Tales of Two Cities, the upcoming
short story anthology by writers of the Hong Kong Writers Circle and Singapore
Writers' Group, and Cheryl Robson, founder of Aurora Metro Books.
Australian-Filipino author Merlinda Bobis launched a Philippine edition of her latest novel Locust Girl. A Love Song. She said:” APWT is important in the light of current geopolitics. Story telling across cultures reminds us that we share a lot of things more than our differences and we are bonded in storytelling.”
APWT’s chair, Hong Kong-based author Nury Vittachi, stressed that APWT is important not just for Asia: “Asia, in terms of population, is bigger than all the other regions put together. So what happens in Asia is important for the world”.
His thoughts were echoed by others. “I
can’t think of any other organisation that brings writers together from all the
corners of Asia, that gets them sharing their work, or gets them to think
critically about what it means to write and to teach writing’ said James Shea,
an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing at
Hong Kong Baptist University.
The APWT Board
is not particularly interested in so-called star appearances. The organisation
has a flat structure and at conferences everyone is hailed by their first name.
The conferences aren’t academic and are
not writers’ festivals either, falling somewhere in between. Speakers are asked
not to read from written papers and to speak about topics that inform their
creative writing, or are problematic to it. As well as keynotes, break out
panels, and master classes, events at our conferences include book launches, and
dinners.
Membership
of APWT is free until further notice. So now is the time to join! The 2016
conference will be held in Guangzhou, China, 24 - 27 November, hosted by Sun
Yat-Sen University. For more information about the 2016 conference email me at jane.camens@apwriters.com. A special Filipino edition of APWT’s magazine LEAP+
was produced for Manila. Click here to take a look.
