AustLit

Chao was born into a family of traditional Chinese painters and became a multilingual poet and translator. He grew up in Hunan Province in south-east China, and completed a post-graduate degree in British and American Literature at the Guangzhou Institute of Foreign Languages in 1988.

Chao's poetry has been extensively published in China where he has won major poetry prizes and he won a global Chinese poetry competition in 1994.

Chao came to Australia in 1995 as visiting lecturer and was the writer-in-residence at Edith Cowan University in 1996 where, and when, Fate of a Grasshopper and Paper Boat were published. He returned to China shortly after.

He has continued to publish poetry after leaving Australia, most recently So Many Worlds: New Poems by Chao (2021). Works published after his departure are not individually indexed on AustLit.