Good writing begins with questions. What does it take to write a good story? How do you get your readers to connect with a character? Each week we'll speak to different writers about memoir writing. Hosted by Caitlin Chang and Sarah Malik.

Tessa Piper shares the incredible story behind her winning SBS Emerging Writers' Competition entry, and how she mustered the courage to share the ‘heaviest of secrets’. Find out why judge Alice Pung described Tessa’s story as 'like a punch to the face and guts with a stolen, diamond-studded glove'. Also joining her is competition runner up Monikka Eliah, who reveals how digging deep took her writing to new places.

The New Writer's Room

The winning competition entry that took 20 years to write

How do you write about mental health and class in a way that is tempered by time but still raw? Should you even go there? SBS Writers' Competition highly commended winners Gemma Tamock, Sidney Norris and Alexander Burton discuss how the competition theme of 'emergence' led them to unpack real life experiences in a way that was both cathartic and compelling.

Writing from pain: the whys and the hows

In a special episode of The New Writer's Room, listen to an exclusive stream of our memoir panel from Sydney Writers' Festival. Co-hosted by Sarah Malik and Benjamin Law, the panel, called 'What If My Mum Reads This?', discusses the perils and pitfalls of using your life as a literary canvas. Listeners will also hear from SBS Emerging Writers' Competition alumni Cat Yen, Alana Hicks and Jackie Bailey. Yen and Hicks are the 2021 and 2020 competition winners, respectively, while Bailey's shortlisted entry was developed into her debut novel The Eulogy.

Listen to our Sydney Writers' Festival panel, 'What If My Mum Reads This?'

The latest episode of The New Writer’s Room looks at what it’s like being published in a book and the writer-editor relationship. Listeners will hear from Emily Hart, an editor at publisher Hardie Grant, and Nancy Huang, a 2021 SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition entrant whose memoir piece, ‘Mini Moke’, was featured in Between Two Worlds: 30 Power Voices from the SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition.

The New Writer's Room: Being published and the writer-editor relationship

In this episode of The New Writer's Room, author and SBS Emerging Writers' Competition judge Alice Pung shares her best advice for competition hopefuls and speaks to Caitlin and Sarah about how she started her writing career.

Alice Pung: 'My published output is a small fraction of what I write'

In the first episode of season two of The New Writer's Room, Caitlin and Sarah speak to Australian author and SBS Emerging Writers' Competition judge Christos Tsiolkas about his creative process and his best pieces of advice for aspiring writers.

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