NZ Young Writers Festival is thrilled to announce our 2024 Robert Lord Writers Cottage Young Writer in Residence!

Posted: Thursday Jul 04, 2024

Sherry Zhang will spend 4 weeks at the cottage on a writing project, as well as joining the festival itself.

Sherry Zhang (章雪莉/Xue Li Zhang) (she/they) is a second-generation Chinese New Zealand writer and editor. She has worked across journalism, poetry, creative nonfiction, and theatre. Most recently, she was the kaiwāwahi/editor at The Pantograph Punch, and has interned in newsrooms like The Spinoff and Bloomberg News. You can find more of her writing in places like Starling and Ensemble Mag. She has received the Metro Mag x Deadly Ponies Feature Writing Scholarship, and her co-written play 杨/Yang/Young with Nuanzhi Zheng was a finalist in the b4 25 Playwriting Awards, staged at Basement Theatre with Auckland Theatre Company.

She is interested in genre-bending works that facilitate nuanced discussions on the intersections of class, race, sexuality, gender, and culture. She is currently working on a choose-your-adventure book exploring revenge fantasies, coffee shops, landlords, Queerness, guilt, shame and letting go.