AAWP 2026: 'Voicing Our Worlds’

The 31st Annual Australasian Association of Writing Programs Conference: “Voicing Our Worlds”, UNSW, Sydney, 2–4 December 2026, supported by the School of the Arts and Media and the Faculty of Arts, Design, & Architecture, UNSW.

Hosted by the Literary Provocations Hub at the University of New South Wales Sydney, the 31st Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP) conference will be held in-person at the UNSW Kensington campus, situated on unceded Bidjigal lands. The conference is a cross-institutional collaboration between UNSW, Macquarie University, University of Technology Sydney, Western Sydney University, University of Wollongong, and University of Sydney. The theme of this year’s conference is “Voicing Our Worlds”.

Graham Akhurst is an Aboriginal writer and academic from the Kokomini of Northern Queensland. He is a Senior Lecturer of Australian Indigenous Studies and Creative Writing and the Director of Indigenous Studies at UTS. He is the author of Borderland published by UWAP (2023).

Living on Bidjigal Land, Clare Britton is an award-winning Australian artist (not Indigenous) and a lecturer working at UNSW. Clare’s visual art practice and her work in live performance are grounded in collaboration and research and explore how landscapes, waterways, and people hold stories.

Conchitina Cruz is Professor at the University of the Philippines Diliman, where she teaches creative writing and literature. Dark Hours, her first book, won the Philippine National Book Award for Poetry. She co-runs the Quezon City-based small press Paper Trail Projects, and was one of the initial series editors of Bloomsbury Academic’s Research in Creative Writing. Recent fellowships include the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship and Bellagio Center Residency.

Arpita Das is the Founder-Publisher of the independent Indian publishing house, Yoda Press and Associate Professor of Writing at Ashoka University. In the past, she has set up and led the Word Lab at IIHS University in Bangalore and the Word to Screen Market at the Mumbai Film Festival. She writes a regular column for the NY-based trade journal Publishing Perspectives.