30 Seconds with

Who are you? 

I'm an essayist / sometimes critic / baby poet who writes about the things I love and the things that puzzle me.

What’s your most recent work?

My debut essay collection, Echoes (Somekind Press), explores lineages, old Chinese pop songs, glamour, fashion, domesticity and inheritances.

What’s your best advice about writing?

Dream, draft, edit, polish, repeat — it's okay if your dreams change and evolve. Stay true to them and dream as 'big' or as 'small' as you like.

If you could change one thing about the Australian writing sector, what would it be?

As a start, I'd like to see the sector shift from ‘diversity’ to genuine inclusivity and justice, where decision-making and resources are not concentrated in the hands of a few. I'd love to see book publishing in Australia take more risks! That said, books are just one form of storytelling. A rich literary landscape includes zines, spoken word, online writing, literary journals, narrative games, digital writing, visual essays and more.

How has ACT Writers (MARION) assisted you?

ACT Writers (MARION) gave me the courage to identify as a writer, built my skills and introduced me to a writing community, both local and national. HARDCOPY was life-changing and ACT Writers (MARION) invited me to be part of my first ever reading!

What are you currently reading? 

I recently finished A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib, Pop Song by Larissa Pham and A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt and highly recommend all three.

Who’s a contemporary author you’d like to champion and why?

In the spirit of championing writers who haven't (yet) published books, I love Danny Silva Soberano's poetry and prose (their writing brims with tenderness, generosity and love) and Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga (her fiction brims with light and magic).

Shu-Ling Chua is a Melbourne-based (formerly Canberra-based) essayist, critic and poet, whose work has appeared in Peril Magazine, Lindsay, Meanjin, and Asian American Writers’ Workshop, among others. Her debut essay collection, Echoes, was published by Somekind Press in 2020.

Shu-Ling was shortlisted in the 2018 Woollahra Digital Literary Award, highly commended in the 2017 Feminartsy Memoir Prize and selected for the 2015 HARDCOPY manuscript development program. She has completed writing residencies at the Wheeler Centre and KSP Writers’ Centre.