AustLit

Author of children's books.

Chris Cheng identifies as Australian-Chinese. After a childhood in Sydney, he trained as a teacher. He has taught at urban and rural schools in New South Wales, including three years in Bourke. But his favourite 'school', according to his website, was the Taronga Zoo Education Centre, where he worked for a number of years (teaching in the Education Centre and operating the Zoomobile, a mobile zoo) and from where he appeared in television shows with animals. He worked for a further few years at Dulwich Hill Public School as a kindergarten teacher, before leaving teaching.

After teaching, Cheng worked as National Children's Development Manager for a chain of Australian bookshops, and has travelled regularly to the United States to work at Purdue University with the BioScope Initiative, a multimedia project producing instructional science materials for students in the USA. He has been an international consultant for the Purdue University-based online journal First Opinions - Second Reactions, which examines children's and young adult literature.

Cheng 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.