Session 1: Cher Tan

Join Cher Tan as she discusses her brilliant 2025 Stella longlisted book of essays Peripathetic. Moderated by Zoya Patel.

About the Book

Highly Commended, Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards 2025, Non-Fiction

ʻThere was something so captivating about always being on the edge, on that shaky precipice of promise — something new and something cool was just lurking around the corner and we’d arrive at it if we kick around long enough.ʼ

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.

‘Tan is searingly intelligent and often very funny, making Peripathetic both a thought-provoking and deeply pleasurable read.’ – Guardian Australia, Best Books of 2024

‘Peripathetic is a fascinating collection, always animated by Tan’s distinctive, acidic voice and rambunctious aesthetic. The essays are bold and always manage to be intellectually engaging and incredibly good fun.’ – Fiona Wright, The Guardian

‘Tan is a sharpshooter, putting into words thoughts that had previously only rattled in my head.’ – ArtsHub

‘Invigoratingly thoughtful, playful and stylistically uncompromising in the best of senses.’ – Sydney Morning Herald/The Age

About Cher Tan

Cher 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.

About Zoya Patel

Zoya 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.

About the Event
• Books will be available for purchase and signing at the event.
• Registration is required for this event.
• Accessible parking spaces directly below the Harry Hartog ANU Bookshop are available should you require them. Parking at ANU/Harry Hartog
• If you do not feel well, please refrain from attending this event.
• Disability Access available - please ask in-store.