Genre knowledge development can be facilitated as writers engage in social interactions and make sense of a new rhetorical situation in a new discourse community. However, the details of this genre learning process are underexplored. The study explores this issue by investigating the relationship between writers’ perception of genre learning through social interactions and their genre knowledge development. Drawing on a sociocultural perspective of lived experience, perezhivanie, the study investigates two multilingual doctoral students’ perceptions of academic genres and their learning to write through social interactions. Data were collected in group writing conferences at an Australian university through observation and audio recordings of the conferences, student interviews, and students’ written drafts. The study found that the students perceived the academic genres in different ways, a “Western style” and “native-speaker thought processes”, which led to their contrasting stances in learning to write. The students’ different ways of negotiating cultural and linguistic identity in the past were related to their different ways of understanding genre-specific knowledge and approaching genre learning through social interactions. Highlighting the role of writers' past experiences in genre awareness, the study offers pedagogical implications for building genre knowledge utilizing social interactions.