The New Writer's Room

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The New Writer's Room is back for its second season. If you're thinking of entering the 2022 SBS Emerging Writers' Competition, consider this your cheat sheet. You will hear from our competition judges Christos Tsiolkas and Alice Pung, and some of the best pieces of advice to inspire you to write your story.

In this special NAIDOC edition of the New Writer's Room exploring 'Literature as Resistance', Dr Larissa Behrendt and Jazz Money discuss how literature can be used to re-centre Black experiences, capture forgotten histories, assert sovereignty, and how writing and truth telling is such a vital part of their work. The episode will also take a deep dive into their latest literary works, Dr Behrendt's After Story and Jazz Money's how to make a basket, and features a special poetry reading from Money.

The Sydney Writers' Festival is back for another year with the festival theme 'Change My Mind'. Join The New Writer's Room co-hosts Caitlin and Sarah as they discuss their top picks from the program. In partnership with the Sydney Writers' Festival.

In this episode of The New Writer's Room, Caitlin Chang is joined by Candice Chung and Sarah Malik to discuss their favourite books of the year. Listen here: https://pod.fo/e/fd14e Consider this your holiday reading list: 7 ½ by Christos Tsiolkas, Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, One Hundred Days by Alice Pung, The Mother Wound by Amani Haydar, No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood, She Is Haunted by Paige Clark, The Republic of Motherhood by Liz Berry, Brown Baby by Nikesh Shuka, The Luminous Solution by Charlotte Wood, A Swim in the Pond In the Rain by George Saunders, Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason, and The Pisces by Melissa Broder.