Melanie Cheng's vivid and absorbing panorama of Australian culture was the winner of the 2018 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the 2018 Indie Book Award for debut fiction and the 2017 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction.
Melanie Cheng is a writer and general practitioner. Of Chinese-Australian heritage, she was born in Adelaide, grew up in Hong Kong and now lives in Melbourne with her family. In 2016 she won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. Her debut short story collection, Australia Day, won the 2018 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2018 Indie Book Award for debut fiction and the 2017 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction. Her writing has been published in Age, Big Issue, Meanjin and Overland among other publications.
‘Melanie Cheng is an astonishingly deft and incisive writer. With
economy and elegance, she creates a dazzling mosaic of contemporary
life, of how we live now. Hers is a compelling new voice in
Australian literature.’
*Christos Tsiolkas*
‘What a wonderful book, a book with bite. These stories have a real
edge to them. They are complex without being contrived, humanising,
but never sentimental or cloying—and, ultimately, very moving.’
*Alice Pung*
‘If only the PM might pick up a copy, even by mistake.’
*Saturday Paper*
‘A wonderful feat of storytelling…Melanie Cheng is an exciting new
writer.’
*Readings*
‘The happy surprise of Cheng’s work as a collection lies in her
resolute grasp of the absolute normalcy of a culture that not so
many years ago was divided and dually suspicious. The census gives
us the facts but it takes fiction to make reality
three-dimensional.’
*Sydney Morning Herald *
‘The author’s empathetic eye and easy facility with dialogue make
the anthology a strong debut, with the longer stories in particular
offering breadth and depth…It feels like Cheng has taken a wide
sample from the census to craft this inclusive portrait of
contemporary Australia.’
*Big Issue *
’The book bears witness to the author’s empathetic eye,
multicultural characterisation and easy facility with dialogue…This
short story collection explores what it means to belong, to be
Australian; its insight from different vantage points and its
photo-realistic narrative make it an exciting and impressive
debut.’
*Judges’ Report, Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, 2018*
‘The stories are unpretentious, diverse, and a lot of the time,
disconcertingly real. Cheng’s characters are just as well realised;
they live on in your head long after you’ve put her book down.’
*Lifted Brow, Favourite Books of 2017*
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