Sarah Attfield, former WCSA president, and University of Technology Sydney (UTS) faculty recommends several Australian working-class authors.  UTS is hosting the December 2025 WCSA conference, and attendees can catch the Wednesday night Creative Showcase, featuring two Sydney authors in conversation with the founder of Sweatshop, a working-class literacy movement.  If you cannot attend, you can still enjoy the evocative prose of these authors.

Winnie Dunn is the first published Tongan-Australian. Raised in a financially marginalized neighborhood, Dunn’s home had no books.  Her first novel, Dirt Poor Islanders (Hachette 2024) won multiple literary awards and was shortlisted for the nation’s top prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award.  A recent Guardian story suggested she sought to invert the narrative of the internationally popular Crazy, Rich Asians. Her protagonist, a mixed-race Tongan-white Australian, grew up in Mount Druitt, the same harsh neighborhood that Dunn was raised in.  Instead of Crazy, Rich Asian’ glitz, Dunn sought to “bring this idea that dirt and the earth and the places you come from are actually quite rich in and of themselves.”

Also showcased will be Natalie Figueroa Barroso, whose Hailstones Fell Without Rain was just published in August. Like Dunn’s autofiction, Barroso’s semi-autobiographical novel explores the marginalization and impoverishment of Australian immigrants, in this case Uruguayan.  Her story follows multiple generations of women across two continents, described by the Sydney Morning Herald as a “love letter to the matriarchy.”  Barroso’s feisty characters may infuriate, while generating the narrative’s tension and joy. Barroso is also a poet and short-story writer.

WCSA conference organizers’ Cultural Showcase bring Dunn and Barroso together with Michael Mohammed Ahmad—all three are Sweatshop staff.  Ahmad is the author of several Miles Franklin shortlisted books, including The Other Half of You and The Lebs.  He founded the organization in 2012, motivated by Black feminist bell hooks’s linkage of mass-based literacy with social justice movements.  hooks claimed: “literacy determine[s] how we see what we see.”  Dunn, Sweatshop’s general manager, had edited several anthologies for Sweatshop, including Brownface, Sweatshop Women Vol 1 and Vol 2, Strait-Up Islander and Another Australia; Barroso is a creative producer.  Ahmad has said in a Los Angeles Review of Books interview that Sweatshop is “a window for me and people like me to push up against our own sense of marginalization.”  WCSA members will appreciate the organization’s synthesis of culture and activism.

–Carol Quirke, WCSA Member At-Large