In Unpolished Gem, Pung’s parents talk about how they escaped the Killing Fields, a term used to describe certain parts of Cambodia where the Khmer Rouge regime perpetrated a state-sponsored genocide resulting in over two million deaths. Pung currently lives with her husband, Nick, in Melbourne, Australia, where she is the Artist in Residence in Janet Clark Hall at the University of Melbourne. In 2014, Pung wrote her first young adult novel, Laurinda, which won the 2016 Ethel Tuner Prize for Young People’s Literature. Pung edited the anthology, Growing Up Asian in Australia, in 2008, and in 2011, she published her second book, Her Father’s Daughter, which won the Non-Fiction Prize in the Western Australian Books Awards that same year.
In 2007, Unpolished Gem was the winner of the Australian Newcomer of the Year Award and it was also shortlisted as an Australian Book of the Year. Pung’s first book, a memoir entitled Unpolished Gem, was published in 2006 to both popular and critical acclaim. She also attended law school at the University of Melbourne and remains a practicing lawyer in the areas of pay equity and minimum wage. Pung spent most of her childhood in Braybrook, a suburb just west of Melbourne, where she attended five different schools, including a Catholic all-girls school. Alice Pung is named for the title character in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland because her father saw Australia as a wonderland full of opportunity and excitement. Alice’s parents, both ethnic Teochew Chinese from Cambodia, escaped the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge regime and arrived in Australia in the late 1980s.
Alice Pung was born the first of four children to Kuan Pung and Chia Kien in Footscray, Victoria, in 1981.
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