The Alice Award 2024

Dear Society of Women Writers,

As the first Alice who has won the Alice Award, I wish I could be here in person with you today to accept this award. It is difficult to convey how much this award means to me in words, despite the irony of this being an award for my writing! One of the earliest recipients of this award was the great Ruth Park, a literary luminary of my entire life – throughout my childhood to adulthood.

Although I never met Park, one of the clearest images I remember of her was a photograph taken for the Sydney Morning Herald, at her typewriter, a toddler child playing beneath her desk, a stack of laundry hanging above her head. I felt I had seen a kindred spirit. This is how I work as well, with three young children and a full-time job. This is the reason I am unfortunately not in Perth today.

But this is also the reason perhaps, that gives my characters their breath. I’ve always worked this way as a writer, surrounded by the inevitable noise and chaos of life. I can’t block it out, because to completely block out distraction you’re also blocking out love in service of your solitary ego. And I can’t take any of this incredible interior world for granted.By interior I don’t mean my own feelings, but the lives of children, women, ordinary pedestrians, invisible workers.

What an honour it is, to have my characters recognised as worthy of celebrating not just in Australian literature, but as Australian literature. This isone of the highest true honours of my life. And I believe a panel of male judges may never have recognised the trajectory of my work (or worse, siphoned me into somedubious category of ‘ethnic’ literature!) but a society of distinguished women writers have – women who understand how our experiences shape our voices.

That’s why when I see the list of past winners - legends likeBrenda Niall, Kate Grenville, Libby Hathorn, Jackie French, Mem Fox, Judith Wright – I see every category of writing recognised, from poetry to fiction to children’s and young adults’ books. I see a list that spans the spectrum of a human being’s whole reading life.

When I was born a month after my parents arrived in Australia, my father remembered a book he’d read as a child about a girl who finds herself in a Wonderland. So he named me Alice, because he survived the opposite, the Killing fields of Cambodia. So even though I was only a day old, my father’s reading was already shaping the course of my life. My mother, on the other hand, can’t read a word of this speech. They’d closed down all the schools in Cambodia when she was in Grade 1. But she said that when you are powerless, you spend a lifetime watching other’s facesand expressions and you become an expert at figuring out character.

I am thankful to all my teachers, for teaching me to write. But I am especially grateful to my parents, for teaching me to see.

And extremely joyously grateful today, for the Society of Women Writers, for awarding me this award! This other bronze Alice will now watch over me for the next two years.How powerful to be barracked for by such a potent and powerful list of women writers I’ve deeply admired, whose names are also engraved on this award.

Thank you very much.

Alice Pung