Join Us at the 2025 Regional Writers Rise Festival!
📍 Location: Traralgon Library
📚 Beyond the Personal: Truth and Authenticity in Memoir

What does it mean to write authentically about your own life? Join Sam van Zweden and Shu-Ling Chua as they explore the relationship between personal stories, truth and vulnerability. They'll discuss navigating memories, honestly representing ourselves and others, and how memoir connects with readers.

Sam van Zweden is a Melbourne-based writer interested in memory, food, mental health and the body. Her writing has been published by the Saturday Paper, The Guardian, ABC Life, Meanjin, The Big Issue, The Lifted Brow, Cordite, the Sydney Review of Books, The Wheeler Centre and others. Her debut book, Eating with my Mouth Open, won the 2019 KYD Unpublished Manuscript Award, and is available now.

Shu-Ling Chua is an 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 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

Please refer to Regional Writers Rise Festival - Terms and Conditions at the bottom of our program page.