Abstracts are being sought for the 13th biannual international conference of the European Association for Studies on Australia (EASA), hosted by the University of Pannonia (Veszprém, Hungary) in cooperation with Topos – Bilingual Journal of Space and Humanities. Abstracts are due before June 5, 2015.

The conference will provide an ideal venue for exploring Australia as a ‘topos’ in the academy and beyond, in ways that will seek to mobilize the manifold meanings of ‘topos’ as place, common place, and commonplace. The very fact that the discipline of Australian studies has constituted itself as a discrete branch of cultural studies, aggregating itself around self-contained and space-bound ideas of the nation, begs the question of biases possibly informing much research it has produced in the past, and points to the possibility of deconstructing today some of the foundational premises underlying the correlated discourses.

The conference will be held between 30 September and 3 October 2015. The deadline for submission of abstracts is June 5, 2015, and notification of acceptance is scheduled for June 20. For further details, see thecall for papers or visit the conference website

The $4000 Guy Morrison Prize for Literary Journalism recognises excellence in Literary Journalism and is awarded for the best piece of Literary Journalism by an undergraduate or postgraduate student enrolled in a Writing or Journalism program in an Australian university. In the context of this Prize, Literary Journalism is defined as: “a factually accurate, well-researched story that demonstrates the use of fiction techniques in a work of non-fiction; a work that is written with style, flair, detailed description and narrative flow; a work that demonstrates a journalistic and critical understanding of some of the finest reportage in the English language”. The work submitted for the Prize must demonstrate these qualities. Submissions close 30 April – click here to download details.

The prize honours Sydney journalist and playwright Guy Morrison, former Production Editor of The Australian and Features Editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, author of the memoir We Shared an Island, and plays Jara, Those Old Picasso Blues, Dancing the Tango in Sensible Shoes, Victor, and Eat Cake.

To qualify for consideration for the Prize, the applicant must:

1. Have been enrolled in a Writing or Journalism Program as a part-time or full-time undergraduate or postgraduate in an Australian university.

2. Have submitted a story of not less than 2,000 words and not more than 10,000 words that exemplifies the qualities of Literary Journalism as stated here.

3. Have produced the work in the 2014 academic year.

There will be only one award presented each year and this will be at the discretion of the judges. The prize may not be given if there is not deemed to be a suitable candidate. The amount of the Prize is $4000. There is a travel allowance of up to $500 if the winner lives outside Sydney.

Do you write short stories? AAWP members are invited to join the international community of writers publishing and selling their work on the new short story publishing website, Cut a Long Story (CUT). The site has been developed in partnership with the National Association of Writers in Education in the UK, and many NAWE members are now featured. If you would like your work to be included ahead of the public launch of CUT later this year (with major financial backing), then do please register now and upload your stories. CUT is proudly committed to a fair deal for writers — and currently fighting the tax on e-books that is imposed within Europe. Visit www.cutalongstory.com

Abstracts are sought for the 20th annual AAWP Conference – Writing the Ghost Train: Rewriting, Remaking, Rediscovering. Swinburne University of Technology will host the conference from Sunday 29 November to Tuesday 1 December, 2015.

The focus of the conference will be the question of rewriting, interpreting and adapting texts.

Papers are invited in three streams: 1) a refereed scholarly stream; 2) a refereed creative stream; 3) a  general non-refereed stream for creative and scholarly texts. Presentations will be twenty minutes each, followed by a ten minutes discussion to allow for the exchange of ideas. Some presentations will be shorter, or longer, especially if they are part of an installation or interactive panel.

Papers and creative presentations are encouraged to explore, but are not limited to, the following four thematic streams, with variants of refereed and non-refereed academic papers and creative works, including installations and interactive panels.

1. ‘Rewriting the historical event’ will address the issue of interpreting or re-interpreting the past through the filters of memory, ideology and ethics.
2. ‘Recovering narratives, re-crafting texts’ will focus on reading drafts and archives against those rewritings that are corrective in nature and those that pay homage to the source, opening a space for modes of editing, teaching and publishing. This stream will also pay attention to the art of literary translation.
3. ‘Rescripting the text, visual encounters in the text’ will bring together an original literary text with adaptations, transpositions or variations.
4. ‘Refashioning the self’ will explore the effects of rewriting texts or remaking images in the experiences of the subject in the text as, for example, through the processes of self-editing, myth-making, and canon-formation.

In addition to this mix of standard academic, pedagogical and creative possibilities, there will be a series of panels and workshops. If you are interested in convening one of these events, or have other suggestions, you are most welcome to get in touch.

Conference information and updates

Conference registration opens 10 April 2015

Abstracts due 15 May 2015, and should be submitted to Dominique Hecq at dhecq@swin.edu.au

Full papers and creative compositions due by 30 July 2015

Final revised papers for inclusion in the refereed stream by 10 December 2015

For more information, see the Call for Papers.

NAWE Conference: Call for Proposals
13–15 November, Durham, UK

The NAWE Conference invites writers and colleagues to share their various approaches to writing and to the teaching of writing at all levels. The deadline for proposals is 4 May 2015, and further information is available on the NAWE website

An International Poetry Studies Institute Symposium
1 May 2015, 9.45am–4pm

This one-day symposium at the Inspire Centre, University of Canberra, will feature readings and presentations by leading poets including Jordie Albiston, Cassandra Atherton, Sarah Day, Paul Hetherington, Lisa Jacobson, Judy Johnson, Geoff Page, Maria Takolander and Jen Webb. A draft program is available on the IPSI website

Despite being imaged all around us in popular culture and the media, death and dying are, it often seems, the last taboo subjects in modern society. To address this, the inaugural Australasian Death Studies Network conference, ‘Death, Dying, and the Undead: Contemporary Approaches and Practice’, will be held at UCQ’s Noosa campus in Queensland on 12 October 2015.

This one-day multi-disciplinary conference brings together discussion and investigation in a range of cultural, humanities and social areas that consider death and dying, including creative arts, popular culture, health and community planning. Abstracts are due 1 May, 2015. Click CFP to download full details or read more …

The Conference will consider the practices and processes around death and dying, and approaches to these topics, including:

• Representations of death, dying and the undead in popular culture
• Gothic representations of the death, dying and the undead
• Death and dying in Australasian culture and history
• Writing and Reading about death and dying
• Approaches to death and dying: at home, in hospital or elsewhere
• The contemporary funeral and the multinational funeral industry
• Images of death and dying in visual art and the media
• The ‘good death’ and what this means in practice and for policy makers
• Roadside memorials, spontaneous shrines and other memorial practices
• Celebrity death and public grieving
• Transgression, death and crime fiction
• Teaching and learning about death
• Other relevant topics and issues

International Keynote Speaker

Dr Lorna Piatti-Farnell, AUT: The Price of Undying: Vampire Genetics and the Cultural Politics of Immortality. Director, Popular Culture Research Centre, Auckland University of Technology, AUT President, Gothic Association of New Zealand and Australia. Chair, Gothic and Horror Area, Popular Culture Association of Australia & New Zealand

Publications and related events

An edited book / special issue of Aeternum: The Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies (founded by Dr Piatti-Farnell) will be produced from this event. The conference will include the opening launch ofThe Vanities, a new exhibition in the CQUniversity exhibition space.

Submissions

Please email abstracts of 200 words, plus your name, email, plus brief bio note (50-100 words) by 1 May 2015 to Zoe Allen, z.allen@cqu.edu.au (Please put ‘Death, Dying and the Undead abstract submission’ in subject line of email.)

Contact/queries

Professor Donna Lee Brien, d.brien@cqu.edu.au

The National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE) in the UK is delighted to announce the online publication of the first issue of its new peer-reviewed journal, which aims to explore the art of writing and to encourage all forms of related research.

The journal publishes scholarly articles about practice and process that contextualize, reflect on and respond to existing knowledge and understanding. Writers featured in the first issue are: Viccy Adams, Farrukh Akhtar, Craig Batty and Stayci Taylor, Donna Lee Brien and Bronwyn Fredericks, John Dale, Peter Griffiths, Mike Harris, Louise Tondeur, Sarah Wardle, J. T. Welsch, and Paul Williams. Guest contributor is Philip Gross. Read more or click CFP to download submission details for the second issue.

Submissions are now invited for the second issue of Writing in Practice, to be published in March 2016 and edited by Kathy Flann, Holly Howitt-Dring, Keith Jebb and Kate North. We are looking for articles that explore the art of imaginative writing of all kinds, highlighting and evolving current academic thinking and practice. Creative Writing itself is welcomed when integral to an article. The deadline for submissions is 5pm (GMT) on 17 June 2015.

Submissions should be in the region of 4-10,000 words, and include an abstract of up to 200 words. All submissions will be anonymously peer reviewed, with feedback given by early October 2015. Please refer to the full submission guidelines on the NAWE website before submitting your work to the editorial board: peer-review@nawe.co.uk

http://www.nawe.co.uk/writing-in-practice