The author of 'The Permanent Resident', Indian-Australian writer Roanna Gonsalves will be part of two panels at this year’s Sydney Writers Festival that will explore identity and women’s writing.
She will be on the panel titled Sweatshop Women, where one will get to hear a group of women writers from different backgrounds from Western Sydney.
“The team of Sweatshop, Western Sydney Literacy Movement, has regularly conducted workshops for women writers of Western Sydney. I was invited as a guest writer to one such workshop and I will be co-launching the first volume, which is a collection of writing by these women writers,” Roanna tells SBS Hindi.
“The writers are fantastic, amazing voices that we don’t generally get to hear in Australia and it is run by women. The writers, the editors and the publishers are all writers,” she says.
The Sweatshop panel features Winnie Dunn, Roanna Gonsalves, Shirley Le, Monikka Eliah, Phoebe Grainer and Ferdous Bahar.
Source: SWF
Ms Gonsalves, who won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award Multicultural Prize, will explore the politics of identity with Fatima Bhutto and Elaine Castillo at the festival.
“It is going to be a fantastic panel where we want to talk about our identity as writers of colour. We always get stereotyped as writers.
“In this panel, we want to talk about what does it mean when it’s only writers of colour that are consistently asked to be on panels about ‘identity’, while white writers are rarely (if ever) seen on such line-ups?
“I will be speaking to Fatima and Elaine and will delve beyond this particular cliché, and discuss how the exploration of geopolitics and history in their work can be unwittingly reduced to ‘identity’?” she says.
A passionate creative writer, Roanna feels, the Sydney Writers Festival is the perfect opportunity to gain a fresh perspective on what is going on in our world today.
“It is a great time of the year to hear different writers from across the world talk about issues and topics concerning the world and us today,” she says.
