[Watch] The 2026 E.W. Cole Lecture: Alice Pung on Keeping Calm and Carrying On

Watch award-winning author Alice Pung offer reasons for optimism in this year’s E. W. Cole Lecture.

Two decades ago, Alice Pung published Unpolished Gem, a funny, loving and irreverent portrait of a migrant family’s everyday struggles and bittersweet triumphs.
  
In celebration of the 20th anniversary of her beloved debut, Pung presents this year’s E. W. Cole Lecture on a subject near to her heart: the fundamentals of writing and the circumstances under which writers practice their craft.
 
Pung speaks on the quiet power of turning up through crises, changing political situations and changing tastes, and what makes it all worthwhile: how writing – and reading – can help us make sense of our lives, and the world at large, now more than ever.  

An in-conversation with host Marina Sano follows the lecture. 

---

_{Originally presented on Thursday 6 August by The Wheeler Centre.
Supported by the E. W. Cole Foundation.}