Asian Women Writers' Collective
Collective of British Asian women writers, active 1984-1997
The Asian Women Writers' Collective (AWWC), formerly known as the Asian Women Writers Workshop, was an organization of British Asian women writers. Founded by the writer and activist Ravinder Randhawa in 1984, the AAWC provided a platform for several British Asian women to enter writing, including Ravinder Randhawa, Meera Syal, Leena Dhingra, Tanika Gupta and Rukhsana Ahmad.
History
The Asian Women Writers' Workshop was founded in London in 1984. Its aim was to support creative writing by Asian women and increase access to publishers. It was initially supported by the Black Ink Collective, and funded by the Greater London Council (GLC). After the GLC's 1986 abolition, it received funding from Greater London Arts Association and Lambeth Council.
The group grew from a core group of eight South Asian members to a national membership of over a hundred, participating together in creative writing exercises and sharing work with each other. In 1987 they changed their name to the Asian Women Writers' Collective (AAWC), with some political debate over whether to include the term "Black" in their name in recognition of political blackness. As Asha Sen recounts:
Some members were in favour of calling themselves 'black' to show their solidarity with Afro-Caribbean women, while others felt discriminated against by certain dominant Afro-Caribbean women's groups. Another set felt that there were too many cultural differences between Asian and Afro-Caribbean writing to make it possible for the groups to respond critically to each other.
“Asian Women Writers' Collective” enters the record as collective of British Asian women writers, active 1984-1997. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Asian, Women and Writers' can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q103920570. VIAF identifies the subject as 126185147. The Library of Congress control number is n95083176. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1984, 1986 and 1987.
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This entry incorporates text from “Asian Women Writers' Collective” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.