BOUNDLESS RETURNS FOR 2019 FESTIVAL

Boundless festival celebrates Indigenous and culturally diverse writers

Australia’s leading festival of Indigenous and culturally diverse Australian writers, Boundless, will return to Western Sydney on Saturday 26 October 2019.

After the success of the inaugural 2017 festival, Boundless 2019 presents a powerful line-up of local and interstate names including Alice Pung, Benjamin Law, Jack Latimore, Nardi Simpson, Sarah Ayoub, Stephen Pham and Winnie Dunn.

The Boundless festival is presented by Writing NSW and the Bankstown Arts Centre in association with Sweatshop and a variety of guest curators.

In recognition of 2019’s status as the International Year of Indigenous Languages, the festival will open with a moving and thought-provoking exploration of Australia’s first languages curated by Gamilaroi and Anaiwon playwright Cathy Craigie.

Other festival highlights include the first staged reading of the new Sweatshop production, ‘Sex Drugs and Pork Rolls’, a performance piece set on the day Donald Trump was elected. The contributing writers are:

• Maryam Azam, a Pakistani-Australian writer from Kellyville
• Winnie Dunn, a Tongan-Australian writer from Mt Druitt
• Shirley Le, a Vietnamese-Australian writer from Yagoona
• Stephen Pham, a Vietnamese-Australian writer from Cabramatta

The festival also showcases Bankstown Arts Centre’s Mother Tongues project, which sees writers grappling with questions of cultural geography, identity and history. Australia’s first anthology entirely produced by women of colour, Sweatshop Women, is on the program and there will also be professional development opportunities for writers.

‘It is important to have culturally diverse writers so that future writers can see doing this sort of work as a possibility and not a dream,’ says Boundless speaker Alice Pung. ‘And not only that, see the boundless range of writing that can emerge.’

The festival will be held at the Bankstown Arts Centre on 26 October 2019 from 10am to 6pm.

Boundless is supported by the Australia Council for the Arts, Create NSW, the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund, Pantera Press and the University of Sydney.

The event is free and registration is recommended. Register for your free ticket on the Boundless website.

Further information: Writing NSW | (02) 9555 9757 | events@writingnsw.org.au

Media contact: Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan | 0404095326 | nicole@fivestarpr.com.au