Melanie Cheng is a writer and general practitioner. She was born in Adelaide, grew up in Hong Kong and now lives in Melbourne. Her debut collection of short stories, Australia Day, won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2016 and the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction in 2018. Room for a Stranger, her highly acclaimed first novel, was published in 2019.
‘How rare, this delicacy—this calm, sweet, desolated wisdom.’ * Helen Garner * ‘Melanie Cheng’s The Burrow is stupendously good. This is a novel that deals with the crucial elements of our lives – love and family and grief and guilt and responsibility – and does so without a whiff of sentimentality and does so fearlessly. As in real life, the characters keep surprising us. The power of The Burrow is in the unflinching yet empathetic command of the novelist, in the candid beauty of the language. It’s a remarkable work, nuanced and human and adult.’ * Christos Tsiolkas *