The Year that Made Me: Alice Pung, 2006

Alice Pung is the daughter of ethnic Chinese Cambodian migrants who fled the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge for Melbourne in the 1980s. She wrote about the joys and struggles of growing up in a migrant community in her first memoir Unpolished Gem, which won the 2007 Newcomer of the Year Award in the Australian Book Industry Awards. Alice went on to write five other books to much acclaim and her first novel Laurinda was adapted for the stage. She was awarded an Order of Australia medal for services to literature in 2022. Guest: Alice Pung, writer-in-residence at Janet Clarke Hall at the University of Melbourne, Adjunct Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University and lawyer at the Fair Work Commission