- to enter your story
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For author Alice Pung, writing has always been "therapeutic". The eldest of four children, Pung was often charged with caring for her infant siblings and writing was a way to distil the angst and frustration she felt.
"I think I wrote because we didn't have Facebook when I was growing up," Pung tells podcast . "It was quite frustrating. I was home a lot with very young children to look after… it was quite lonely and isolating."
Needing a way to vent, 11-year-old Pung turned to writing. "I filled all these notebooks with angry musings about my parents, and how unfair everything was," she laughs. "After I did that, I did feel better. I could deal with a crying baby."
As a judge of the 2022 SBS Emerging Writers' Competition, alongside fellow author and friend, Christos Tsiolkas, Pung knows the importance of putting your story on the page – whether or not anyone else reads it. "I write out of necessity a lot of the time," says the author of books including One Hundred Days, Laurinda and Unpolished Gem. "My published output is just a small fraction of what I write in terms of letters and diary entries."
It was her childhood diary entries that inspired Pung's first piece of prose, a short story assignment for an elective writing subject she took during her law degree at the University of Melbourne. "I wrote my piece two days before it was due. I just looked over these old diary entries and there was one that was quite funny. I was so angry that my pen had gone through five pages," she says. "That was the basis of my short story."
Eventually, she started looking for publications to place her work. "I didn't even think of literary publications," she says. "I went to Woman's Day, New Idea, places like that because they paid $200 a story." It was one of her creative writing lecturers who gave her a list of literary journals including Meanjin.
"My first story was published in Meanjin, it was called 'Unpolished Gem'. And then a year later I got a call from my editor of 20 years from Black Inc. Books, Chris, who said, 'I read your short story in Meanjin. You've got a really interesting voice. It seems like it's part of a bigger work. Is it?'
"Of course it wasn't, really," she says. "It was just one story I wrote. I had nothing else, but I actually said, 'Yes, it's part of a book that I'm writing,' and so that's how I came to write [my 2006 debut memoir] Unpolished Gem with him. I just had to take the opportunity as it came."
Her advice for writers hoping to enter the competition? "Just do it because I had no idea where my work would end up," she says. "People are scared to do it. And then they talk about writing and they spend more time talking about writing than actually doing it."
These days, Pung is a mother of three working part time for the Fair Work Commission, and still follows this philosophy of just getting it done.
"I don't have a routine because life changes," she says. "I just write whenever I can find scraps of time. And that's the best advice I can give you."
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The SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition is open for entries on August 16. Write a non-fiction memoir story on the theme of ‘Emergence’ for your chance to be awarded the $5000 first place prize, $3000 second place or two runners up prizes of $1000. The top entries will also be published in an anthology by Hardie Grant. Go to to register and find out more.
The anthology from the 2021 competition Between Two Worlds published by Hardie Grant is out now.
