Stella Day Out Canberra - Cher Tan
Join Cher Tan as she discusses her brilliant 2025 Stella longlisted book of essays Peripathetic. Moderated by Zoya Patel.
10am, Saturday 2 August
Harry Hartog ANU Campus
University Avenue, Acton, ACT, 2601
Peripathetic is about shit jobs. About being who you are and who you aren’t online. About knowing a language four times. About living on the interstices. About thievery. About wanting. About the hyperreal. About weirdness.
Cher Tan’s essays are as non-linear as her life, as she travels across borders that are simultaneously tightening and blurring. In luminous and inventive prose, they look beyond the performance of everyday life, seeking answers that continually elude.
Paying homage to the many outsider artists, punks, drop-outs and rogue philosophers who came before, this book is about the resistance of orthodoxies — even when it feels impossible.
Cher Tan is an essayist and critic. Her essays, criticism and other written work has been published widely. She is an editor at Liminal and the reviews editor at Meanjin. Her critically-acclaimed debut collection of essays, Peripathetic: Notes on (Un)belonging, is now out with NewSouth. She lives and works on unceded Wurundjeri Country.
Zoya PAtel is the award-winning author of No Country Woman (Hachette, 2018), a memoir of race, religion and feminism, as well as the novel Once A Stranger (Hachette, 2023). She was formerly the editor of Lip Magazine, co-host of the Margin Notes podcast, and founder of the digital literary journal Feminartsy, which published and mentored emerging writers from 2014 to 2018.
Zoya has won numerous awards for her writing and editing, and has been published widely, including in The Guardian, the Australian Financial Review, ABC, SBS, Junkee, Overland, Meanjin, Sydney Morning Herald and more. She was a 2020 judge for the Stella Prize, and Chair of the 2021 Stella Prize Judging Panel.