Modern Mehfil

Harrison Abbott is a Gamilaroi writer and poet working from the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people in Naarm. Harrison studies a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Melbourne. You can read his work in Voiceworks and Cordite. He writes and edits the student paper of the University of Melbourne, Farrago.

Parth is the Associate Producer at Emerging Writers Festival, performance poet and writer from Pune, currently based in Naarm.

Their work has appeared at BBC’s Contains Strong Language, Kolkata Literary Meet, Vogue India, Melbourne International Film Festival and more.

They believe in the ability of words to mobilise, energise and interrogate – that poetry isn’t just art, but a magical sustenance of sorts.

Aziz Sohail is a Pakistan-passport holding curator and writer whose work builds interdisciplinary connections between art, history, archives, literature, theory, and biography and supports new cultural and pedagogical infrastructures. Their research and resultant projects honour and recognise the power of queer and feminist collectivity, sociability, joy, and wayward encounter and unfold through slowness, collaboration, and tentacularity.

Lucy Fan Xu 徐帆 (she/her) is a writer based in Naarm, Melbourne. Her works, which have previously been published in Voiceworks, HOISZN and Red Pocket Press, orbit around themes of identity, community and embodied writing. She is currently studying a Master of Creative Writing, Publishing and Editing at the University of Melbourne.