Shirley Le: In Conversation at Shellharbour City Library

Event Details

Meet author, Shirley Le, at Shellharbour City Library for a morning of conversation on her debut novel, Funny Ethnics!

Saturday 20 July. 11am at City Library

About the author:

Shirley Le is a Vietnamese-Australian writer from Yagoona and a member of the Sweatshop Writers Collective, a Western Sydney Literacy Movement. Her writing has appeared in The Age, Overland, Meanjin and several Sweatshop anthologies. Her first novel Funny Ethnics was published by Affirm Press in 2023.

About Funny Ethnics:

“I looked at the streets of Yagoona through eyes stinging with melted Maybelline liquid liner. Yagoona looked back at me, the wannabe hipster who dreamed of moving to a share house in the inner west, and cackled.”

Funny Ethnics catapults readers into the sprawling city-within-a-city that is Western Sydney and the world of Sylvia Nguyen: only child of Vietnamese refugee parents, unexceptional student, exceptional self-doubter. It’s a place where migrants from across the world converge, and identity is a slippery, ever-shifting beast.

Jumping through snapshots of Sylvia’s life – from childhood to something resembling adulthood – this novel is about square pegs and round holes, those who belong and those on the fringes. It’s a funhouse mirror held up to modern Australia revealing suburban fortune tellers, train-carriage preachers, crumbling friendships and bad stand-up comedy.

In Funny Ethnics, Shirley Le uses a coming-of-age tale to reveal a side of Australia so ordinary that it’s entirely bizarre.