UNSW Kensington Campus during Naidoc week 2019

2-4 December 2026 | UNSW Kensington

AAWP 2026

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Overview

The 31st Annual Australasian Association of Writing Programs Conference: “Voicing Our Worlds”, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2–4 December 2026.

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 Sydney, Macquarie University, University of Sydney, University of Technology Sydney, and Western Sydney University. The theme of this year’s conference is “Voicing Our Worlds”.

Photo credit: Rostyslav Savchyn on Unsplash

Call for Abstracts

SUBMIT ABSTRACT

In our contemporary world, the multifaceted terms, “voices”, “voicing” and their many conjugations and articulations are intertwined with key considerations in our discipline of Creative Writing. First Nations writers have been leading discussions about the real-life consequences of the amplification of some writerly voices and the silencing of others. We hear writers say that they are “giving voice to the voiceless” in their work, a formulation famously critiqued by the writer Arundhati Roy who said “There’s really no such thing as the “voiceless”. There are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard.”^[1]

Such provocations about voicing, silencing, hearing and their links to power are in productive tension with our discipline of Creative Writing in so many ways. In the process of composition, writers expend labour searching for the right voice through craft-based choices including considerations of form, style, lyricism, prosody, metaphor, symbolism, imagery, character design, narrative design etc while agents, mentors, publishers, scholars, critics and judges of literary awards often frame discussions and make decisions around the uniqueness of the writer’s voice in literary texts. In a narratological sense, questions about the voice of the narrator or character, and the differences from and connections to questions of perspective have helped extend the boundaries of our discipline.

In the entanglements between Creative Writing and feminist, queer, postcolonial and disability studies, and ecocriticism, the interrogation of voice is often central to creative and scholarly knowledge-creation, from the advocacy for stronger literary representation of minoritised voices to our ongoing conversations related to the more-than-human. The challenges and possibilities offered by AI have complicated our understanding of voice, demanding new ways to address the key questions of our time as they relate to the work we do as writers and scholars.

We invite scholarly and creative contributions that address these ideas directly or in tangential yet fresh ways. Abstracts/Proposals may address, but need not be limited to, the following themes:

First Nations voices in our world
The voice of the writer in the public sphere
Voice, power, representation
Voice, disability and neurodivergence
Diverse voices in the writing workshop
Voices in translation
Voicing the past, the present, and the future
Voicing the popular
Intertextuality and the voices of others in literary work
Mentoring relationships and voice

Prize culture and voice
Creative Writing pedagogy and voice
Our disciplinary voice in the higher education sector
Formalist or craft-based conceptions of voice, tone, and/or perspective
Vocalising the relationship between the human and the more-than-human
Vocal Aesthetics in literary texts
Algorithmic composition, SLMs, LLMs, machine automatism and the human voice
Voice as reflected in form and style (including hybrid forms that disrupt literary conventions and challenge genre classifications)
Voice as it can emerge in various modes of poetry, and in lyric prose

We welcome abstracts/proposals for individual papers or panels of three to four speakers that speak to our theme as it relates to the discipline of Creative Writing, on creative and professional writing practices and processes, research in creative writing, the teaching of writing and related issues.

For individual papers: a 350-word abstract + a 100-word bio note
For panels: a 700-word abstract for the panel, including a brief description of the panel and a 100-word abstract of each paper + a 100-word bio note for each speaker.

Please submit abstracts to aawp2026@unsw.edu.au by 31 May 2026.

^[1] Roy, Arundhati, ‘Roy’s full speech’, Sydney Morning Herald, November 4, 2004

Schedule

Postgraduate and Workshops Day

Tuesday Dec 1, 2026: The conference will include an online-only Postgraduate Day on Tuesday Dec 1 for Creative Writing Honours Students, Postgraduate Students, Higher Degree Research Candidates and Early Career Researchers from across Australia and Asia. We will also offer a suite of in-person and online workshops for all AAWP 2026 delegates. More details coming soon.

Conference: Day 1

Wednesday December 2, 2026

Plenary 1: 'First Nations Standpoints and Creative Writing'

A conversation between Eugenia Flynn (Monash University) and Graham Akhurst (University of Technology Sydney), moderated by Tess Scholfield-Peters (UTS), supported by the Writing & Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University.

More details coming soon.