2024: Ho Chi Minh City
We’ll be in Vietnam (Saigon) from June 2 to 9
Many writers benefit from the fresh perspective that a foreign sky affords. Authors at Large (AAL) was designed for both established and emerging writers who love travel, who need time and space to write, and who want to engage with an international community of other writers. Our writing retreats and workshops attract serious writers and we strive to create a conducive environment that is culturally diverse and intellectually stimulating.
In June, we’re headed to Vietnam! This literary week will be led by AAL co-founders Robin Hemley and Xu Xi. Dates are June 2 to 9, 2024: please visit the webpage for details at this link.
2022 to 2023
Post Covid, we were finally able to begin live retreats again in May 2022 and held a small one in Thessaloniki, Greece. In 2023, our June retreat & literary week was at the historic The Arts House (pictured above) in the exciting city-state of Singapore. For the first time, we also featured exclusive sessions with two New York publishers & editors from international mainstream and indie presses who spoke to and met with participants. You can read about the Singapore program HERE.
Email aalauthors@gmail.com for further information.
Testimonials
past retreats
In 2017, we held three international week-long retreats. The first was at the end of May in Siglufjordur, a historic fishing village in northern Iceland. Eleven writers participated in workshops led by Xu Xi (fiction) and Brenda Miller (nonfiction). In July, twelve writers joined us for a retreat in Hua Hin, a beach resort town on the southern coast of Thailand, location of the royal family’s summer palace. Madeleine Thien led the fiction group and Robin Hemley led a generative writing workshop in fiction & nonfiction. Xu Xi made a brief appearance and gave a salon on publishing. The following week, Robin Hemley returned to the private island of Telunas in Indonesia (site of our inaugural retreat in 2016) to hold our last summer retreat of 2017 with four writers for an intensive workshop week. And in fall we held our very first Urban Weekend Retreat in Hong Kong led by Xu Xi where 14 fiction & nonfiction writers gathered for an intensive workshop centered around writing craft using their own work as text for discussion and further generative exercises. We also had lunch/informal sessions on publishing & the business of writing.
In 2018, we held our annual retreat in Hua Hin, and Ira Sukrungruang, Chantelle Aimée Osman and Xu Xi led three workshops in nonfiction, genre fiction and fiction. There were salons each evening and some previous clients and several new writers joined us as well. We held a 2019 retreat with two workshops in fiction/genre fiction, co-led by Chantelle and Xu and one in nonfiction led by Ira. Robin Hemley joined us and that year we introduced private consultation sessions with our participants by Robin and Xu about their writing or publishing or other aspects of the writing life.
We had a wonderful retreat planned in 2020 in Luang Prabang, Laos, but due to the global pandemic, we replaced our live retreats with a series of online retreats & workshops instead. We’re happy to be hosting live retreats & workshops again!