Laura Jean McKay is a writer and performer whose award-winning prose has been published and featured broadly, from Best Australian Stories to ABC Radio National. Her short story collection received high commendation in the Clouds of Magellan Novel Competition, and she has recently completed a Young Adult fiction novel. She has lived and worked in Southeast Asia, with her travel writing published by Lonely Planet. McKay will use her residency to work closely with the Nou Hach Literary Project to research Cambodian storytelling. She will research and begin writing a novel exploring 1960s Cambodia in the build up to the Pol Pot regime, an underrepresented period in Cambodian history set against the Vietnam War.

Supported by Arts Victoria and The Australia Council.

A journalist with The Sydney Morning Herald, Hamish McDonald has spent much of his career working from Asian cities – Jakarta, Tokyo, Hong Kong, New Delhi and Beijing – and has won Walkley Awards for his reports. His books are Suharto's Indonesia (1980), The Polyester Prince (1998) and (with Desmond Ball) Death in Balibo, Lies in Canberra (2001). McDonald’s writing residency will take him to Temple University, where he will work on a narrative involving individuals on both sides of the Pacific war. During his time in Japan, he hopes to engage in current affairs debates of Tokyo whilst researching contemporary Japan and its historical interaction with the West since the Meiji period.

Supported by Arts NSW and The Australia Council.

Keri Glastonbury is a poet, essayist and creative writing lecturer at the University of Newcastle. She is currently the poetry editor of Overland, an editor with the small publishing company Local Consumption Publications and has directed ‘Critical Animals: National creative research symposium’ as part of Newcastle’s emerging arts and media festival This Is Not Art (TINA). Her latest poetry collection, Grit Salute, will be published in 2009. Glastonbury will be based at The Australian Studies Centre at Himachal Pradesh University where she will work on various DIY life-writing projects, engaging with the local literary community.

Supported by The Australia India Council and The Australia Council.

A playwright who works with Platform Youth Theatre and Victoria Legal Aid, Michele Lee has presented work in the Melbourne Fringe Festival, the Emerging Writers’ Festival, 3DFest and Short + Sweet. She runs an independent theatre collective, Theatre in Bars. In 2009 she will be a member of St Martins Youth Theatre’s Emerging Writers Group. She is currently developing full-length plays See how the leaf people run and In refuge, which are about her people - the Hmong. Lee will be hosted by the Community Environmental Promotion and Cultural Association in Laos where she will assist with theatre programs and continue working on her plays.

Supporting by Arts Victoria and Victoria and The Australia Council.

Don Henderson is an author and teacher whose first three novels, Half the Battle (2006), Keepinitreal (2009) and Macbeth, You Idiot! (2009) are aimed at young adult readers. During his residency at Areca Books he will work on a speculative fiction novel (partially set in Asia) that explores the importance of cultural diversity and the dangers of environmental exploitation. While in Malaysia Henderson is particularly keen to discover what engages Malaysian readers and make them laugh, and hopes to find some Malaysian literature that could be used in Australian classrooms.

Supported by Arts SA and The Australia Malaysia Institute.

John Mateer is a poet and art-critic. He has published five books of poems in Australia, and a number of smaller publications, often in translation, in Australia, South Africa, Indonesia, Japan, Macao and Portugal. His forthcoming books are Southern Barbarians, a collection of poems about the Portuguese empire, a gathering of twenty years of his South African poetry titled Ex-White, and a New and Selected edition of his Australian poems, The West. His residency at the Bookworm will be a project investigating the experience and thought of European writers – Luis de Camoes, Camillo Pessanha and Victor Segalen – who lived in those regions in the early modern period.

Supported by The WA Department of Culture And The Arts, and The Australia China Council.

Author of five collections of poetry, Susan Hawthorne has had her work included in Best Australian Poems 2006 and 2008, in Australian and international literary magazines, in metropolitan newspapers and on radio. Since 1998 she has been a Research Associate at Victoria University where she supervises post-graduate students in Creative Writing. Hawthorne is an aerialist, a student of Sanskrit and a publisher whose residency at the University of Madras will allow her to develop her skills in the art of Indian poetry rhythms. Her time in Chennai will be used to write a long poem - using the bovine as a central metaphor - that addresses the symbolic role the cow plays in both Indian and Australian culture.

Supported by Arts Queensland and The Australial Council.

Pam Scott has worked in Vietnam for more than a decade, and is the author of Life in Hanoi (2005), Managing for Success in Vietnam (2008), and The Jewels of Halong Bay: A Tale of Adventure in French Indochina (forthcoming). She is also the creator of a 30-minute DVD More Than Boat People: The Vietnamese Migration Experience Through Women’s Eyes, (2007). During her residency in Vietnam with The Gioi Publishing House, Scott plans to conduct in-depth interviews with Vietnamese women, collect stories about women’s lives and work on a play about the issues facing those who left Vietnam and those who stayed behind.

Supported by The Australia Council. 

David Prater is the editor of online poetry journal Cordite. His writing has appeared in a variety of Australian and international newspapers and journals, as well as online. His poem 'in a dim sea nation' was included in Best Australian Poetry (University of Queensland Press) 2003. In 2004 he completed a Master of Arts at the University of Melbourne, his thesis being an examination of that curious confection, marzipan. In 2005 he was an Asialink resident at Sogang University in Seoul, where he pursued his obsession with multiplayer gaming centres, PC Bangs. Prater is returning to Seoul in 2009 as a guest of the Korean Language Translation Institute. Prater's publications include The Happy Farang (self-published, 2000), We Will Disappear (papertiger media, 2007) and Morgenland (Vagabond Press, 2007).

Supported by The Malcolm Robertson Foundation.