Boundaries and Borders in Australian Life Writing

This special issue seeks to understand how transnational Australian identity is represented by authors within their life writing. It asks how they portray the transversal, the transactional, the translational and the transgressive within their self-reflexive writing. The special issue is based upon a selection of papers given at the fourth Asia-Pacific Conference of the International Association for Biography and Autobiography (IABA) at the University of Adelaide in November 2021. This conference brought together over 80 academics from across the world, in hybrid format, around the theme “Life Writing: Transnationalism, Translingualism, Transculturalism”. The conference was multilingual and engaged with life writing across languages, cultures and national borders. The articles selected for this issue encompass analyses of refugee writing, travel writing and migrant writing, for example, and underscore the multilingual and multifaceted nature of Australian writing more broadly.