![](/generated/640w-1/melina-marchetta-1-jpg-1560995122.jpg?1698338767)
People in the Margins
Melina Marchetta + Melanie Cheng + Tony Birch
Auditorium 2, State Library of Queensland
Panel
8132
#Performances
#About the event
Duration: 60 minutes
Three authors discuss the freedom they experience writing about people living on the margins of society.
#Artists
Melina Marchetta
Melanie Cheng
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. Her short story collection Australia Day won the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript and the 2018 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the 2018 Indie Book Award for debut fiction and the 2017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. Room for a Stranger is her second book.
Tony Birch
#Moderator
Joy Lawn
Joy Lawn is a current judge of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and Queensland Literary Awards.
She writes the young adult literature column for the Weekend Australian. Her reviews and interviews have also appeared in Australian Book Review, SMH/The Age, Books+Publishing and professional journals. She blogs about literary fiction, young adult and children’s literature at https://paperbarkwords.blog/
Joy is fascinated by ideas and images and how authors and illustrators express these with truth and originality.