Alice Pung
Alice was born in Footscray, Victoria, a month after her parents Kuan and Kien arrived in Australia. Alice’s father, Kuan - a survivor of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime - named her after Lewis Carroll’s character because after surviving the Killing Fields, he thought Australia was a Wonderland. Alice is the oldest of four - she has a brother, Alexander, and two sisters, Alison and Alina. Alice grew up in Footscray and Braybrook, and changed high schools five times - almost once every year! These experiences have shaped her as a writer because they taught her how to pay attention to the quiet young adults that others might overlook or miss. Alice Pung’s first book, Unpolished Gem, is an Australian bestseller which won the Australian Book Industry Newcomer of the Year Award and was shortlisted in the Victorian and NSW Premiers’ Literary awards. It was published in the UK and USA in separate editions and has been translated into several languages including Italian, German and Indonesian. Alice’s next book, Her Father’s Daughter, won the Western Australia Premier’s Award for Non-Fiction and was shortlisted for the Victorian and NSW Premiers’ Literary awards and the Queensland Literary Awards. Alice also edited the collection Growing Up Asian in Australia and her writing has appeared in the Monthly, the Age, and The Best Australian Stories and The Best Australian Essays. Alice is a qualified lawyer and still works as a legal researcher in the area of minimum wages and pay equity. She lives with her husband Nick at Janet Clarke Hall, the University of Melbourne, where she is the Artist in Residence.
One Hundred Days
Alice Pung
From one of Australia’s most celebrated authors comes a powerful mother-daughter drama that explores the fault lines between love and control, pairing the claustrophobic intensity of Room and My Year of Rest and Relaxation with the youthful angst of Freshwater. Sixteen and pregnant, Karuna finds herself trapped in her mother’s Melbourne public housing apartment for one hundred days awaiting the birth of her child—and her mother’s next move in a shocking power struggle over who will raise the baby. To fill the seemingly endless hours of her imprisonment, she writes to her unborn child, determined that her baby will know the truth, no matter what happens. Karuna’s pregnancy is the result of a heady act of independence, lust, and defiance that happened in a moment of freedom from her overprotective mother. In reaction to her daughter’s recklessness, Karuna’s mother locks her inside their apartment to her to make sure she can’t get into any more trouble. While postpartum confinement is a tradition in many cultures, is Karuna’s an act of love—or emotional abuse? As the birth approaches, Karuna and her mother repeatedly trip the fault lines between love and control. And somehow, despite their battles, Karuna recognizes her mother’s love in even the strangest of behaviors. At times tense and unnerving, One Hundred Days illuminates the pain, confusion, and thrill of growing up and the overwhelming desire of adults to protect the children they
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