Writers - Surnames P

Nakao Eki Pacidal

Nakao Eki Pacidal is a Pangcah/Amis writer, translator, and Indigenous activist from eastern Taiwan. Her literary debut was a short story Lion of Nubia (2003, with illustrations by BO2). In recent years, she has written more than a dozen novels and novellas. She is among the first Indigenous writers in Taiwan to engage in epistemological discussions through novel writing, as evidenced by her work Spells of the Remote Islands (2014). In 2017, she received the Taiwan Literature Award for short story by an indigenous writer. Pacidal's stories and novels encompass a diverse array of cultures and topics, often intertwining history and science.

ZZ Packer

ZZ Packer was born in Chicago and raised in Atlanta and Louisville, Kentucky. She graduated from Yale, and afterward received degrees from Johns Hopkins and The Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. She has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, a Hodder Fellow at Princeton, and a Lillian Golay Knafel fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.

Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Story, Ploughshares, GRANTA, Zoetrope All-Story, Best American Short Stories 2000, Best American Short Stories 2003 and 100 Years of The Best American Short Stories.

Her non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, The Believer, The American Prospect, The Oxford American, The Guardian, The New York Times Book Review, Newsweek Digital Online andThe New Yorker Online. She has appeared on the BBC World and on MSNBC as a Huffington Post contributor.

She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the American Academy of Berlin Prize (postponed). In 2007 GRANTA Magazine named her one of America’s Best Young Novelists. Her collection of stories Drinking Coffee Elsewhere won the Commonwealth First Fiction Award, an ALEX Award and was a National Book Award 5 under 35 winner. It became a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2004, and was selected for the Today Show Book Club by John Updike.

ZZ Packer is editor of New Short Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2008. She is at work on a novel about the Reconstruction and Buffalo Soldiers entitled The Thousands, an excerpt of which appeared in The New Yorker’s decennial “20 Under 40 Fiction Issue;” the previous issue having honored writers such as Junot Diaz, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jhumpa Lahiri and Michael Chabon.

She has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, The Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, Tulane University, Stanford University and Johns Hopkins. She’s most recently taught writing at MIT and Williams College, where she was also a writer-in-residence, as well as Harvard University and Vanderbilt, where she currently teaches in the MFA program.

story and science.

Diane Hinton Perry

Diane Hinton Perry, a native of Washington, DC, ventured to the Midwest for her higher education. She received her BA in English from Carleton College in Minnesota. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MA in African American and African Diaspora Studies from Indiana University, Bloomington, where she focused on African American Literature. Her stories have appeared in the journals Ploughshares, Day One, and Short Story and in the magazine African Voices. She’s an alum of the Community of Writers Fiction Workshop, the Key West Writer’s Workshop Program, the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, the Vermont Studio Center’s Residency Program, and the Huston/Wright Foundation Writer’s Week. She’s currently at work on a collection of linked short stories, one of which appears in the Fall 2023 issue of Ploughshares.

Judith Nika Pfeifer

Judith Nika Pfeifer is a poet, writer, and multimedia artist based in Vienna and Brussels. Her debut short story collection zwischen Czernin investigates various states of "betweenness" while experimenting with storytelling forms. Her work emerges from the intersections of movement and text, collecting linguistic moments and findings from urban spaces. Pfeifer's writings have appeared in anthologies and literary magazines across German-speaking countries like kolik, text+kritik, perspektive, and Lichtungen. She was Max Kade Visiting Professor at the University of Arizona (2018) and taught at Georgetown University (2020). As teacher at the Vienna Poetry School and the University of Applied Arts Vienna (2021), she conducts workshops on innovative creative techniques. Pfeifer has received several awards including the Reinhard Priessnitz Prize and Austrian Buchprämie and holds an Interdisciplinary PhD from the University of Vienna. Her most recent book is a collection of poems: Tiger Toast (2024).

Anitha Devi Pillai

Anitha Devi Pillai (Dr) is an applied linguist, author, and poet. She is an academic at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. At NIE, she teaches courses on literacy practices, writing pedagogy and creative writing. She concurrently holds the position of a research fellow with Indian Heritage Centre, National Heritage Board, Singapore, and serves on the boards of the Indian Community Oral History Committee as well as the Publications Consultative Panel of Ministry of Communications and Information.

Her primary area of research focuses on the Singapore Malayalee community. In 2013, she won a National Heritage Board grant to study the literacy practices and ethnic heritage of the Singapore Malayalee community and subsequently published From Kerala to Singapore: Voices from the Singapore Malayalee Community in 2017.

Some of her other books include From Estate to Embassy: Memories of an Ambassador (2019), and Sembawang, which she translated from Tamil to English in 2020. Her translated novel was shortlisted for both the NUS History Prize and Best Literary Work in 2021. Other publications are A View of Stars (in 2020), A Tapestry of Colors 1 & 2 (in 2021), and The Story of Onam (in 2021).

She’s an avid lover of poetry and many of her poems such as A Kiss on your Forehead, Mother Tongue and Home is a Three-syllable Word are taught in schools and at the university in Singapore, Australia, Philippines, and India. Her creative works focus on heritage, identity, and culture.

Huang Ping

Huang Ping, Born in 1981, is a writer, literary critic. He holds a Ph.D. in Literature from Renmin University of China and currently serves as Professor and Associate Dean of the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at East China Normal University (ECNU). Additionally, he holds the positions of Executive Vice Dean of ECNU's Creative Writing Research Institute and Secretary-General of the China University Creative Writing Alliance. Recognized for his academic contributions, he has been selected for China's National High-Level Young Talent Program, honored as a Shanghai Dawn Scholar, and named Zijiang Outstanding Young Scholar at ECNU. He is a member of the Presidium of Shanghai Writers’ Association and a member of Chinese Writers Association. His published works include the short story collection The Uncanny Stories of Shanghai and a literary critique collection of Leaving the Northeast.

Cathal Póirtéir

Cathal Póirtéir is a writer and broadcaster who works in Irish and English. For over thirty years he worked as a producer and presenter on RTÉ radio, regularly making programmes that focused on Irish-language literature, folklore and history. He also facilitated many Irish-language writers in commissioning short stories, poetry and plays for the radio, and wasinvolved in many programmes which dealt with literature in Irish. He edited several books in Irish and English including an anthology of short stories in Irish. Cathal holds an MA in Irish Folklore from UCD and has lectured widely at home and abroad. His collection, Tonnchrit Inntine, was nominated for an Irish Times Literary Award and his stageplay, Púcaí Dallóg, won an Oireachtas literary award. He has written original radio drama and adapted two novels and a series of Irish folktales for radio. He is Irish-language consultant to Books Ireland, Eagarthóir Gaeilge at writing.ie and an occasional contributor to Treibh in The Irish Times.

Julia Prendergast

Julia lives in Melbourne, Australia, on unceded Wurundjeri land. Her novel, The Earth Does Not Get Fat (2018) was longlisted for the Indie Book Awards (debut fiction). Her short story collection, Bloodrust and Other Stories, was published in 2022. Julia’s short stories and prose poems have been recognised and published: Lightship Anthology (UK), Glimmer Train (US), New Writing (UK), TEXT (AU), Séan Ó Faoláin Competition (IE). Her narrative-driven essays have been widely published in New Writing, and elsewhere. Julia is Associate Professor and Discipline Leader (Creative Writing, Literature, and Publishing) at Swinburne University, Melbourne. She is President|Chair of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP), the peak academic body representing the discipline of Creative Writing in Australasia. Julia is a practice-led researcher, an enthusiastic supporter of transdisciplinary, open and collaborative research practices, with a particular interest in neuro|psychoanalytic approaches to writing and creativity.

17th International Conference on the Short Story in English