Alice Pung
“My favourite book as a child, or at least the first book I can remember liking, was Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar. I loved the pages connected by the cut-out holes, I thought it was magical. A few years ago, I read that Eric Carle had grown up in wartime Germany, and had been conscripted by the government to dig trenches. He thought about food a lot then, and perhaps that’s what inspired the book.
As a young adult, I loved the books of Lois Lowry, Cynthia Voight, Robert Cormier and John Marsden because these writers did not write in ‘teenager’ voices. Writing is about setting down thoughts, not words, and the thoughts of young adults are generally more complex and sophisticated than how they speak. These authors understood this, which is why their books sing.”
About Alice:
Alice Pung is a writer, lawyer and teacher. She was born in Footscray and grew up in Braybrook, attending local primary and secondary schools in the Western suburbs.
The author of Her Father’s Daughter and Unpolished Gem and the editor of Growing up Asian in Australia, Alice has received enormous critical acclaim for her writing. Unpolished Gem won the 2007 Australian Newcomer of the Year award in the Australian Book Industry Awards and was shortlisted for several other awards including the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards and The Age Book of the Year 2007. Unpolished Gem has been translated into other languages and is also published in the UK and US.
Visit Alice’s website
