Shu-Ling Chua is a Melbourne-based essayist, critic and poet. Her essay collection, Echoes, won the 2021 Small Press Network Book of the Year Award.
Shu-Ling was shortlisted for the 2021 Deakin University Nonfiction Prize and 2018 Woollahra Digital Literary Award, highly commended for the 2017 Feminartsy Memoir Prize and selected for the 2015 HARDCOPY manuscript development program.
Her work has appeared in Peril Magazine, Meanjin, Triangle House Review, Asian American Writers' Workshop and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter @hellopollyanna.
Read a review by Dzenana Vucic here and a review by Anthea Yang here.
SPN BOTY judges: Echoes stands out in its form as something experimental and unique, unlikely to be published by larger mainstream publishers. It is unapologetically Chinese-Australian in an industry that remains starkly white. The use of untranslated Chinese within parts of the text establishes a cultural barrier between non-Chinese readers and the author, affecting moments of cultural othering that stays with such readers long after the book is finished. At the same time these moments remind readers that we do not have to come from the same cultural background or speak the same language to empathise with and understand one another. continued