Cat Yen was the winner of the SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition in 2021. Of Chinese descent, she is based in Naarm and currently working on her debut memoir. Proudly the daughter of factory and retail workers with no creative credentials, she is a data analyst for her day job.
Through the genre of memoir, Yen hopes to capture the complexity of working-class, migrant and gendered journeys towards stability and contentment, dreaming of story-telling that feels equal parts raw and hope-giving. When sitting with her writing, she would like readers who have experienced precarity and disadvantage to feel a little less alone in the complexity of their inner worlds. She believes that all of us, minorities most urgently, need stories with happy endings that feel real.
