THE FUTURE IS WRITTEN

THREE AUTHORS MOVING THE CONVERSATION FORWARD WITH THEIR POWERFUL PERSPECTIVES AND WORDS OF CHANGE

These next-gen authors are making a difference with their words of change.

fariha róisín

Canadian-australian writer Fariha Róisín says of her early, voracious reading habits: “I was a hugely horny child… my sister is seven years older, so I read a lot of things I probably shouldn’t have quite young.” But it was formative: “I read

White Teeth by Zadie Smith when I was 11. I met Zadie last year and told her it was moving to me to read that book at such a young age because I had never seen a fully formed Bangladeshi person in anything in the West before that.”

Now 30, Brooklyn-based Róisín is a writer and editor whose words have appeared in The New York Times and

The Guardian, as well as a visual artist, podcast host and even a casual astrologist. Her work has a distinct focus on the ways race, faith and queer identity intersect. Last year’s poetry book How

To Cure A Ghost covered heavy issues such as the racism she encountered in the fallout of 9/11, but also had wryly comical takes on misogyny (such as in “All The Things We’re Actually Thinking When Men Think We’re Staring”).

This September, Róisín is set to release her first novel, Like A Bird, which she started writing as a 12-year-old living in Sydney. To her, the greatest privilege of writing is: “To speak truth; to actualise your truth onto the page.”

She adds: “There’s nothing like getting messages from sweethearts around the globe telling me how much [my work] has meant to them. It’s truly a feeling unlike any other.”

vivian pham

At 19, Vivian Pham’s debut novel The Coconut Children stands in stark opposition to the “navel-gazing” criticisms often levelled against her generation. Instead of writing about her own reality, the book is set in gritty ’90s Cabramatta in Sydney, and based largely on the experiences of her father and a family friend. (Pham’s dad fled Vietnam for the US as a teenager; she was born in Orange County before moving to Australia.)

It’s paid off: the book – based on a novella she concocted during a weekend writing program when she was just 16 – received early praise from Paul Kelly and Benjamin Law, and was the subject of an intense publisher bidding war. Back then, the program’s leaders would text each other with snippets of her writing in awe. One recalls Pham emailing philosopher Noam Chomsky to seek his advice on being an activist. He replied.

In 2018, when Pham gave a speech at The International Congress Of Youth Voices (in which she posited: “Nobody’s history is innocent. We must be brave enough to claim it all”), she shared the stage with writers/activists Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Dave Eggers, with Eggers later calling Pham: “One of the indispensable voices of her generation.” And Pham is intent on using that voice for good. “Having a platform is the privilege [of writing],” she says. “It can seem a solitary passion, but it’s a conversation. Being able to help others in ways similar to how I have been helped by my favourite writers is my greatest hope.”

elizabeth acevedo

While working as an eighth-grade English teacher in Maryland in the US, Elizabeth Acevedo fielded a question from a student that made her think differently about the poetry she’d been writing for most of her life: “Where are the books that sound and look like us?” Acevedo quickly got to work – not just plugging away at the novel in verse that would become The Poet X, but scouring the internet to learn about the nuts and bolts of the publishing world.

As a result, The Poet X considers, with unflinching focus, what it means to step into womanhood as a young person of colour, and the feelings of shame and confusion that often come with it. It has been a fixture on The New

York Times Young Adult Best Sellers list and has won numerous awards, including the 2018 US National Book Award For Young People’s Literature. But even more meaningful are the many emails Acevedo receives from readers with messages like, “You wrote me down.”

Acevedo is undoubtedly a publishing success story – her third novel, Clap When

You Land, arrives in May – but she’s looking forward to a day when work like hers is the rule, not the exception. “We need more writers of colour who are given space beyond their first book,” she says. “We need more editors, copy editors, graphic designers. It has to be across the industry, from the marketer to the publicist. If it’s just writers, the creativity is there, but the machines behind them that get these books into the spaces they need to be in – mindfully – will be lacking.”