5 Questions with Vijay Khurana

“I read all my work aloud as I redraft because the way it sounds is important to me, but voice isn’t just about style. It can also be a mode, a novel’s way of thinking, like in Beckett’s The Unnameable.”

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Cher Tan
5 Questions with John Young

“That constant replacement of the immediate past with ‘the new’ is a dissociative tendency—a psychological condition that negates empathy or melancholic mood states. Modernism and settler-colonialism both engage in similar dissociative practices—it’s conceptual territorialisation.”

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Cher Tan
5 Questions with Kaya Ortiz

“Part of the beauty of poetry, for me, is that I can let go of the desire to be understood. I can let go of accuracy and clarity in favour of a more nebulous, emotional truth in a playful space that is rife with possibility.”

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Cher Tan
5 Questions with Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa

“If it’s not my story to share, I won’t share it. I only share my lens, the impact on me, my take on the world. I hate trauma porn so I’m not going to exploit my people’s history in order to make a bunch of white audiences feel something.”

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Cher Tan
5 Questions with Cameron Liang

“Self-publishing makes it possible for anyone with an internet connection to hold a copy of their own book in their hands. It also makes it possible to disseminate that book throughout a community, a society, and the world.”

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Cher Tan
5 Questions with Leyla Stevens

“I find it important to have a period of downtime in the studio between projects. To be kind of aimless and spend time reading or drawing—things that form a baseline for the bigger ideas to grow.”

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Cher Tan
5 Questions with Brannavan Gnanalingam

“I’m unashamedly a political writer—some people (and writers) think writing shouldn’t be political or polemical, and I have no idea who came up with that rule. Who benefits from such a rule? Not minorities.”

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Cher Tan
5 Questions with TENDER

“[…] all these labels and myths about Western Sydney only restricts us as artists; frankly I’m tired of caring how we’re perceived. Like me, this work just wants to exist.”

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Cher Tan
5 Questions with Brian Castro

“I’ve always had a dispute with narration, since it traps the reader in immersion, like a drowning dragonfly. (Are writers part of the entertainment industry? Are books pastimes?)”

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Cher Tan
5 Questions with Nusra Latif Qureshi

“I am averse to the idea of a conventional-looking facade and simplified visual emulation of historical language. I am not too interested in what the image ‘looks’ like; I am more focused on how a complex thought can be represented through methods learnt from an existing long-established practice of painting.”

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Cher Tan