▪ / Press and Reviews / ▪
Highly commended at the 2025 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards – Nonfiction
Longlisted at the 2025 Stella Prize
“Despite being incredibly personal experiences, which gives the collection an idiosyncratic edge, the universality of Tan’s subjects are indisputably what makes parts of the work shine.”
Review by Danny Yazdani (Aniko Press)
“[…] a collection of essays on internet culture, late capitalism, memory and migration, stitched together with biting humour and philosophical clarity.”
Interview with Samantha Corry (RUSSH)
“Instead of asking how to be one’s authentic self under capitalism, Peripathetic is curious about whether capitalism leaves us with any room for authenticity at all.”
Review by Ruby Thiagarajan (Mekong Review)
“It’s a wilful inscrutability, because I never want to be co-opted.”
Interview with Leah Jing McIntosh (LIMINAL)
“[…] she’s a trickster writer who judges her own performance.”
Review by Rosemary Sorensen (Independent Australia)
“Tan’s essays rise out of a defiant, DIY sensibility and sustain a dissident energy.”
Review by Vanessa Berry (The Conversation)
“I’m drawn to writing that reimagines current absurdities and prods at the many senseless contradictions around us, so we can hopefully crawl our way out.”
Interview with Max Easton (Barely Human)
“These days, the essay has become a careful little dance of confession, vulnerability and relatability. Cher Tan’s not playing and she’s certainly no Jia Tolentino.”
Review by Jane O’Sullivan (Art Guide Australia)
“Cher Tan delivers the reader the mirror held up to society and shatters it with a hammer.”
2025 Stella Prize Judges’ Report
“Tan writes about the inside, the outside and how the insidious centre somehow keeps its hold, even when we know it cannot, should not.”
Review by Briohny Doyle (Kill Your Darlings)
“[…] she has a knack for deadpan one-liners that are devastating in effect”
“The best Australian books out in May” (The Guardian)
“Cher Tan is an archivist, a historian, a scribe of this pointy end of the convergence of neoliberalism and the internet in the first decades of the 21st century”
Review by James Whitmore (The Library is Open)
“[…] invigoratingly thoughtful, playful and stylistically uncompromising in the best of senses".”
The Booklist by Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll (The Age)
“Tan is particularly skilled at identifying and analysing the demarcations between us as they pertain to matters of culture and subculture, work and technology, authenticity, punk communities and the internet.”
Review by Max Easton (Sydney Review of Books)
“[…] the personal material that she deploys in Peripathetic is how it is almost always a secondary concern; it is the ideas that guide these essays.”
Review by Fiona Wright (The Guardian)
“Tan is a sharpshooter, putting into words thoughts that had previously only rattled in my head. She is a stylist.”
Review by Karen Leong (Artshub)
Interview with Xen Nhà on Women on the Line (3CR)
“I don’t critique my own work as I write.”
Debut Spotlight: Interview (Kill Your Darlings)
“Given the rapid acceleration of our image-conscious media economy, Tan may be right to identify “hope” as our strongest force of counterattack.”
Feature interview with Ariana Haghighi (Honi Soit)