The authors included here are a selection of AustLit authors who have publicly discussed Chinese heritage, and the influence of the heritage on their writing.
They are prolific and influential storytellers in Australia. They have been included for one or more of the following criteria:
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Tony Ayres was born in Macao, 1961, and grew up in Western Australia. Tony is a prose writer, editor, screenwriter and director.
He wrote, directed and narrated China Dolls, an award-winning documentary about gay Asian men in Australia. In 1997 he won the Jury Prize at the International Cinema and Television Convention in Geneva for his script Ghost Story. His documentary Sadness, based on William Yang's performance monologue, was nominated for four 1999 AFI awards.
In 2011, he adapted Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap for television. The Slap won four Australian awards and was nominated for the international Emmy Awards - Drama. Tony remains one of Australia's most prolific directors, screenwriters and producers.
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Brian Castro was born at sea, between Macao and Hong Kong. His father was descended from Spanish, Portuguese and English merchants who settled in Shanghai at the turn of the century. He is also of Chinese descent through his mother, the daughter of a Chinese farmer and an English missionary. He has published in English, which was first taught him by his maternal grandmother but his first language was Cantonese Chinese, followed by English, Mecanese (a 'hybrid' Portuguese spoken in Macao) and French.
In 1988, Birds of Passage was translated into Chinese by Li Yao, President of the Writer's Association of Inner Mongolia, as was his other award winning novel, After China. In 1994 he was writer-in-residence at the University of Hong Kong and in the latter part of 1995 he was Writing Fellow at the Australian National University, the University of Canberra and University College, Australian Defence Force Academy.
In 2008, Castro was appointed to the position of Professor of Creative Writing, University of Adelaide.
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Chris Cheng is an Australian-Chinese author of children's books. He holds a Master of Arts in Children's Literature and has been co-regional advisor (Australia and New Zealand) for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI); as of 2017, he is the co-chair of the International Advisory Board for SCBWI. Along with Jackie French, he is one of two ambassadors for the National Centre of Australian Children's Literature.
His work is often about the environment, ecosystems, and animals, or about Chinese-Australian history and culture. He was won wide-ranging awards, including Wilderness Society Environment Awards for non-fiction and picture books, an Aurealis Award, and the Lady Cutler Award for Distinguished Services to Children's Literature in New South Wales. As well as works individually indexed on AustLit, he has also published a wide range of non-fiction works about Australian fauna.
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Tom Cho graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree (Professional Writing) from Deakin University in 1995, and completed a PhD in Professional Writing at Deakin in 2009. He has worked in the fields of writing and publishing, including jobs as a technical writer, freelance journalist, freelance editor, and proof-reader. While he continues to do freelance editing, Cho's primary work is in the arts industry, as an artist and artsworker (particularly within the field of community cultural development). He has worked for organisations such as Melbourne Fringe, National Young Writers' Festival and Footscray Community Arts Centre.
Cho has written poetry but now favours short stories. He has been published in Australia, USA, Canada, Japan, France and Italy. He also performs spoken word, makes a zine and has a blog.
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Benjamin Law has worked as a magazine editor, music journalist, reviewer and writer. His essays and columns have appeared in The Monthly, Qweekend, Sunday Life, Cleo, Crikey, The Walkley Magazine, The Big Issue, New Matilda, Kill Your Darlings and the Australian Associated Press. He has also appeared as a panellist on the ABC television program Q&A.
In 2012, he toured India with Australian writer Kirsty Murray and three Indian writers in the Bookwallah, an initiative which took the five across India by train on a kind of travelling library that took them between literary festivals.
Ben is the brother of the writer Michelle Law, with whom he co-authored Shit Asian Mothers Say (2014). He has a PhD in creative writing from Queensland University of Technology, and has worked as a researcher, co-author and associate producer on The Family Law (tv series) and Deep Water (SBS).
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Jennifer A. Martiniello is an award winning poet, writer, visual artist and academic of Aboriginal Arrernte, Chinese and Anglo-Celtic descent. Her father was Richard Longmore (1914-1985), born Richard Chong at Oodnadatta, South Australia. Martiniello spent a period in the Australian navy and has lectured in various areas of education at the Canberra Institute of Technology and the University of Canberra. Her honours thesis in the Faculty of Arts, ANU was entitled 'Australian Women's Auto-Portraiture: 1970s-1980s' (1991).
Martiniello edited Black Lives, Rainbow Visions: Indigenous Sitings in the Creative Arts (1999), a resource directory of Indigenous peoples working in the contemporary visual, literary and performing arts in the Australian Capital Territory.
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Alice Pung is a writer and lawyer born in Footscray, Victoria, and grew up in Braybrook, attending local primary and secondary schools in the Western suburbs of Melbourne. Her parents are Teochew Chinese from Cambodia, who sought refuge in Australia in 1980 after fleeing the Khmer Rouge.
Pung has worked extensively with both primary and secondary school students as an art instructor, independent school teacher, and student mentor. Pung's work has been widely taught in Australian universites, particularly the memoir Unpolished Gem and the edited collected Growing Up Asian in Australia. Among her awards are the Ethel Turner Prize (NSW Premier's Literary Awards), the Western Australian Premier's Award (non-fiction), and the ABIA Award for Newcomer of the Year.
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Shaun Tan , the son of a Malaysian-Chinese father and an Anglo-Irish mother, is a multi-award winning artist and writer. Tan grew up in Perth, Western Australia and lives and works in Melbourne.
He is a children's writer and illustrator. His picture book The Lost Thing was adapted into a short film, which in turn won five awards including the Academy Awards Best Animated Short in 2010.
His work has won or been nominated for over 120 awards, as at November 2019. His international awards include Locus Awards, the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, Hugo Awards, and a World Fantasy Award. In Australia, his work has repeatedly won Ditmar and Aurealis Awards, as well as Premier's Awards across the country, multiple Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Awards, and more.
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Gabrielle Wang's great-grandfather travelled to the Victorian goldfields from China in 1853. Wang grew up in Melbourne, where she studied graphic design at RMIT. She later worked as a graphic designer, and studied Chinese at Melbourne University. Keen to learn more about her Chinese heritage, Wang lived in Taiwan for five years, and then lived for a time in China. She studied painting in both countries.
She returned to Australia and taught Chinese at Homesglen TAFE, at the same time enrolling in a TAFE course about writing for children. It was this course that led Wang to produce her first book, The Garden of Empress Cassia. It won the 2002 Aurealis Award (children's division - best long fiction) and was listed on the international USBBY Outstanding International Books List in 2012.
Since then, Wang has published a range of works for younger readers, including the series Poppy (for Our Australian Girl) and Pearlie, and standalone works including A Ghost in My Suitcase (for which she won a second Aurealis Award) and The Beast of Hushing Wood.
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William Yang's grandparents emigrated from China to Northern Australian in the 1880s, and Yang was born in Mareeba, Queensland in 1943. Yang is a biographer, photographer, dramatist and artist.
He appears in Tony Ayres's documentary China Dolls, about the experiences of gay Asian men in Australia. Ayres later directed a film version of Yang's Sadness to great acclaim. During the first half of 1998 the New South Wales State Library hosted a major exhibition of his work entitled William Yang Diaries: A Retrospective Exhibition.
In 2004 Yang directed Merv Bishop in Flash Blak. In 2005-2006 he conducted workshops in storytelling and documentary making (including a return to Dimbula) and collaborated with Kate Champion and Kate Shearer on theatre productions. In 2010, Yang held a visiting fellowship at the University of New South Wales. The fellowship enabled him to digitise some of his performances into a small screen format. In 2011, Yang was awarded an Australian Council Fellowship.
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Beth Yahp was born in Malaysia to a Chinese father and a Thai-English mother. Her family lived in Petaling Jaya, outside Kuala Lumpur. After her family emigrated to Australia, Yahp gained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communications from the University of Technology, Sydney.
She has written and published short stories in English, and has read on many public occasions. Her novel The Crocodile Fury, was published in 1992 to widespread acclaim. In 1993, she won a $10,000 fellowship for her novel The Water Trinket.
In 2018, her biography Eat First, Talk Later, was shortlisted for the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, Award for Non-Fiction.
Yu Ouyang ( 欧阳昱 )graduated from Wuhan Institute of Hydro-Electric Engineering (now Wuhan University) with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and American Literature, then completed a Master of Arts degree in Australian and English literature at East China Normal University in Shanghai. From 1983 to 1986 he worked as an interpreter and translator in China and as a lecturer in English at Wuhan University from 1989 to 1991.
After coming to Australia, Ouyang undertook his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree at La Trobe University on the representation of the Chinese in Australian fiction. Since then his literary work has appeared regularly in most major Australian and many overseas literary journals. In addition to his poetry, criticism and English translations of Chinese literature, he has translated many major Australian works into Chinese, including The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes and The Female Eunuch and The Whole Woman by Germaine Greer.
In 1995 he was awarded a translation grant by Arts Victoria for The Ancestor Game by Alex Miller and the following year received a major grant from the National Book Council for a translation of The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead.
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