AustLit

Ouyang Yu, now based in Melbourne, came to Australia in early 1991 and, by early 2022, has published 138 books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, literary translation and literary criticism in the English and Chinese languages. He also edits Australia’s only Chinese literary journal, Otherland (since late 1996). His noted books include his award-winning novels, The Eastern Slope Chronicle (2002) and The English Class (2010), his collections of poetry, Songs of the Last Chinese Poet (1997), New and Selected Poems (Salt Publishing, 2004) and The Kingsbury Tales: A Complete Collection (2012), his translations in Chinese, of The Female Eunuch (1991), The Ancestor Game (1996), The Man Who Loved Children (1998, new edition 2014), The Shock of the New (2003, new edition 2019), The Fatal Shore (2014) and Nothing if not Critical (2016), his book of literary criticism, such as Chinese in Australian Fiction: 1888-1988 (Cambria Press, 2008) and his history book in Chinese, A History of Literary Exchange between Australia and China (Showwe Publishing, Taiwan, 2016).

Ouyang’s poetry has been included in the Best Australian Poetry collections for 9 times from 2004 to 2016, including his poetry translations from the Chinese in 2012 and 2013, and has been included in some of the major Australian collections, such as The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry (2009) and The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (2010) as well as The Turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry (2014).

In 2003, his first novel, The Eastern Slope Chronicle, was shortlisted for NSW Premier’s Literary Award and won the SA Arts Award for Innovation in Fiction in 2004.

In 2010, his second novel, The English Class (Transit Lounge), was named one of the Best Books of 2010 in Australian Book Review and The Age as well as the Sydney Morning Herald. This novel has since won the Community Relations Award in the 2011 NSW Premier’s Literature Award, and was short-listed for Christina Stead Fiction Award in the 2011 NSW Premier’s Literature Award,the 2011 Western Australia Premier’s Literature Award, the 2011 Queensland Premier’s Literature Award and the Melbourne Prize (in 2012). His third English novel, Loose: A Wild History, supported with a grant by Arts Victoria in 2000 and released in August 2011 by Wakefield Press, forms the Yellow Town Trilogy, together with his first, The Eastern Slope Chronicle, and his second, The English Class.

When Loose: A Wild History was published, one Australian critic said she would recommend Ouyang Yu as one of the three nominees for the Nobel Prize in Literature, ‘This is because I think that (along with Brian Castro and Gerald Murnane) Yu is a possible candidate for a Nobel Prize in Literature’: http://anzlitlovers.com/2011/12/18/loose-by-ouyang-yu/

His book of bilingual poetry, Self Translation (2012), short-listed for NSW Premier’s Translation Award in 2013, and a novel, Diary of a Naked Official (2014), were both published by Transit Lounge. His book of Chinese poetry, yongju yixiang (Permanently Resident in a Strange Country), was published in China in June 2016 by Zhejiang Literature and Arts Publishing House.

Ouyang Yu was nominated one of the Top 100 Most Influential Melbournians for the year 2011 as well as the Top 10 most influential writers of Chinese origin in the Chinese diaspora.

He was the finalist for the Best Writing Award in Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2012, and he also won an Honour Prize (for complete works) in Naji Naaman's literary prizes 2013 (visit www.najinaaman.org for more info).

In July 2014, The Fatal Shore he translated into Chinese won Book Award for Translation, awarded by the Australia-China Council, and, in 2016, he won a special award from Australia-China Council for his contribution to Australian Studies in China between 2000 and 2016, for ‘his contributions to Australian Studies in China through major translations and original works of scholarship’.

His translation in English of Chinese poetry, titled, Breaking New Sky: Contemporary Poetry from China, was shortlisted for the Multicultural NSW Early Career Translator Prize in 2015.

His poetry book, Fainting with Freedom, was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Award in 2016.

He was the ‘Siyuan Scholar’ and professor of English at Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, China, from late 2012 to May 2019.

In 2016, he won an Australia Council grant for writing a book of bilingual poetry, Flag of Permanent Defeat, which was published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2019.

His English translation of 4 Chinese poets in 4 books was published in April, 2019, by Puncher & Wattmann as well.

He was awarded a major Australia Council award for writing a novel in January 2019, with the result that the novel has been written.

On April 30th, 2019, the announcement was made that Ouyang Yu was one of the top ten poets in China for 2018, selected by the Xiron Poetry Club, part of the Beijing Xiron Books Ltd., established in 2015, the most important and influential private publishing company in China, and on September 18, 2020, he was once again nominated one of the top ten poets in China for 2019 by the Xiron Poetry Club.

On 28 November 2020, it was announced by ACAA, Australia China Alumni Association, that he won the honour of the Alumni of the Year in 2020.

From January to September 2020, he has published two collections of English poetry, Living After Death (MPU) and Terminally Poetic (Ginninderra Press), three poetry books of translation in English (Puncher & Wattmann), and a number of Chinese books.

Ouyang’s work has been translated into Danish, Swedish, Polish, Spanish, Russian, Kazakh, Vietnamese and Catalan.

His book of poetry, Terminally Poetic, won the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for a Poetry Collection in the 2021 Queensland Literary Awards. He was also shortlisted for the Melbourne Prize in 2021 and he won the Fellowship awarded by the Australia Council for the Arts in late 2021.

Ouyang translated A coach heading towards the provinces by Xifeng Yedu.

Ouyang maintains a website at www.huangzhouren.com.

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.

Law 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).

Law has also been a co-host of the Radio National program Stop Everything.

In 2022, Hachette Australia announced that they had entered into a 'scouting partnership' with Law, in which he would scout new writers for the Hachette Australia and Lothian lists.

Yang's grandparents emigrated from China to Northern Australia in the 1880s. He grew up on a tobacco farm in Dimbulah and attended high school in Cairns. He holds an architecture degree (1968) from the University of Queensland and an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Queensland for his services to photography. Yang won International Photographer of the Year (1993) at the Higashikawa-Cho International Photographic Festival in Japan.

Yang moved to Sydney in 1969 and worked with the theatre group Performance Syndicate for many years before successfully turning to freelance photography. He held his first solo exhibition Sydneyphiles in 1977. In 1983 he began exploring his Chinese heritage, changed his surname to Yang and became a Taoist. On his website, Yang describes himself as 'a decorative Taoist' rather than an authority. His Chinese ethnicity and homosexuality are two of the major motifs in his work.

Beginning with 'The Face of Buddha' in 1989 at the Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney, Yang has toured locally and internationally with a highly successful series of slide projection monologues. These include: 'China Diary'; 'Sadness'; 'The North'; 'Friends of Dorothy'; 'Blood Links'; 'Objects for Meditation' and 'China'.

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.

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.

Tony Ayres grew up in Western Australia. In addition to his prose writing and editing, he has extensive credits as a screen-writer 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 has also Produced Wanted, Glitch, The Family Law, Barracuda, Seven Types of Ambiguity. and the contemporary reimagining of The Devil’s Playground.

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.

After arriving in Australia, he attended boarding school in Sydney and gained a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Sydney in 1971 and a Master of Arts degree from the University of Sydney in 1976. A secondary teacher until 1976, he spent one year teaching at the Lycée Technique Aulnay-sous-Bois, Paris. He returned to teaching for a period and then became a part-time milk deliverer and writer in the Blue Mountains. He won first prize in the 1973 Sydney University Short Story Competition and in the 1981 Nepean Review Short Story Competition. He has given public addresses, lectures and readings of his work at the Fellowship of Australian Writers (FAW), Katoomba, in 1982, the Multicultural Writers' Conference, Sydney, in 1984, Mitchell College and Orange Town Hall, in 1985, The Sydney Biennale, Art Gallery of NSW, in 1988, the Université de Paris, Nanterre, in 1988, The Université de Rouen in 1988 and at the Université de Toulous-Le Mirail, Toulouse, in 1988.

Also 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.

Alexis Wright, activist and award-winning writer, is from the Waanji people from the highlands of the southern Gulf of Carpentaria. After her father, a white cattleman, died when she was five, she grew up with her mother and grandmother in Cloncurry, Queensland. She has worked extensively in government departments and Aboriginal agencies across four Australian states and territories as a professional manager, educator, researcher, and writer.

Wright was coordinator of the Northern Territory Aboriginal Constitutional Convention in 1993 and wrote 'Aboriginal Self Government' for Land Rights News, later quoted in full in Henry Reynolds's Aboriginal Sovereignty (1996). Her involvement as a writer and an activist in many Aboriginal organisations and campaigns has included work on mining, publications, fund raising, and land rights both in Australia and overseas.

Besides being published widely in magazines and journals, Wright has edited Take Power Like this Old Man Here, an anthology of writings on the history of the land rights movement in Central Australia, which she edited for the Central Land Council. She has also written Grog War (1997) a book dedicated to the achievements of the traditional Aboriginal Elders of Tennant Creek in their war against alcohol.

From November 2017 until June 2022, Wright held the Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne. 

Her first novel, Plains of Promise (1997), was nominated for national and international literary awards. However, it was her second novel, Carpentaria that made Wright a figure in world literature, when she won the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2007. Previously, this work had been rejected by every major publisher in Australia until published by Giramondo in 2006. Subsequently, Carpentaria was nominated for and won five national literary awards and has been re-published and translated in the United States and in Europe. Wright’s third novel, The Swan Book (2013), was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin.

Her first novel, Plains of Promise (1997), was nominated for national and international literary awards. However, it was her second novel, Carpentaria that made Wright a figure in world literature, when she won the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2007. Previously, this work had been rejected by every major publisher in Australia until published by Giramondo in 2006. Subsequently, Carpentaria was nominated for and won five national literary awards and has been re-published and translated in the United States and in Europe. Wright’s third novel, The Swan Book (2013), was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin.

Wright has participated in many writers' festivals, conferences, readings and writers workshops in both Australia and overseas, and has been community writer-in-residence for the Central Land Council. Although Wright received a rudimentary education while at school, she has completed degrees in social studies, media and creative writing at universities in Adelaide and Melbourne, and has been a Distinguished Research Fellow at The Writing & Society Research Centre, University of Western Sydney. In November 2017, she was appointed as the Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne.

Wright's fourth novel, Praiseworthy, was AustLit's 1,000,000^th record, and won the Fiction Book Award at the 2023 Queensland Literary Awards. Wright is also a renowned essayist, having written multiple essays on Indigenous sovereignty, story-telling and climate change.

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.

Writer and lawyer Alice Pung was 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 was educated in a number of Melbourne schools, including what was then Christ the King College (now Christ the King Primary school and Caroline Chisholm Catholic College), a Catholic girls' school. A qualified lawyer, she still undertakes work as a legal researcher in the areas of minimum wages and pay equity.

Pung worked extensively with both primary and secondary school students,  as an art instructor, independent school teacher, and student mentor. she has been Writer in Residence and pastoral care adviser at Janet Clarke Hall, the University of Melbourne. In the wake of her young-adult novel Laurinda, she compiled and edited a collection of short stories by Australian secondary-school students influenced the themes of the novel, in My First Lesson.

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. She has also been shortlisted for awards such as the Colin Roderick Award, the 'Nib', the Age Book of the Year Award, the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction (NSW Premier's Literary Awards), and the Barbara Jefferis Award. Laurinda was longlisted for the Stella Prize, which has never yet been won by a young-adult novel.

In addition to work individually indexed on AustLit, her work has also appeared widely in Australian periodicals, including Meanjin.

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.

Cho previously ran a venture known as Beaker, an organisation for developing and producing text-based art projects.

As a writer, Cho is interested in questions of identity and popular culture. (Source: Tom Cho)

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.

Bella Li is a Melbourne poet. Born in northeastern China, she immigrated to Australia with her parents at the age of three. She holds a double degree in Arts / Law from University of Melbourne (with a major in English Literature), and has worked as a research assistant, judge's associate, and editor. In 2013, she enrolled in a PhD at the University of Melbourne.

Michelle Law is a Brisbane-based writer in print (primarily non-fiction), screen, and stage.

Law's short work has been anthologised in publications including Women of Letters : Reviving the Lost Art of Correspondence, and has appeared in a variety of Australian newspapers and periodicals. Her stage plays include Single Asian Female, which premiered at La Boite. In April 2018, her web series Homecoming Queens (which she co-wrote and starred in) was released on SBS on Demand.

She is the sister of the writer Benjamin Law, with whom she co-authored the book Sh*t Asian Mothers Say.

Author and general practitioner.

Born in Adelaide, Cheng lived in Hong Kong from 1986 until 1998, when she returned to Australia for university. As of 2018, she was based in Melbourne.

In 2017, Cheng published her first book, Australia Day, a collection of short stories. It won two Victorian Premier's Awards: the Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2016 and the Prize for Fiction in 2018. Her previous short fiction has been shortlisted for awards including the Hal Porter Short Story Competition and the Rhonda Jankovic Literary Awards.

Tian Di was born in China and graduated from the Department of Computer Science at Harbin Institute of Technology. After graduation, he worked as a software engineer for eight years in China. In his spare time, he wrote and published fiction, essays and criticisms. He migrated to Australia in 1989. Since then, he has taken up various jobs including software engineer, kitchen hand, taxi driver, salesperson and newspaper columnist. He has published extensively in Australia, covering a wide range of genres.

Professor Wang Labao holds a BA from Soochow University, an MA from Fudan University, and a PhD from the University of Sydney. He taught at Soochow University for over thirty years. In 2017, he was appointed Director of the Australia-China Institute for Arts and Culture. In 2020, Professor Wang Labao was profession at Shanghai International Studies University.

Andy Quan grew up in Vancouver and studied at Pearson College, Victoria (Canada), Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario and York University. In 1994 he was appointed co-odinator of the International Lesbian and Gay Association in Brussels, Belgium; a position he held until 1996. He travelled extensively and worked for a time in London before moving to Australia in 1999 where he took up a position as International Policy Officer for the Australian Federation of AIDS Organizations. He has published poetry and short stories in Canada and Australia.

Quan is also a singer and songwriter.

Pizhu Hong has worked, studied and lived in Australia over a considerable period. In addition to his creative writing he has published A Thorny Journey: A Study of the Acculturation Process of Some Chinese ELICOS Students in Brisbane, Australia through Griffith University in 1992, Under The Southern Cross in 1997, A Record of Australian Scenery in 1999 and Culture, Recognition and Belonging in 2003. These extended essays in Chinese contain his unique views of life in Australia and a variety of experiences, chiefly as a guide for others who may be newcomers. He has registered also with the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters (NAATI).

Liu Hai Ou graduated from the Department of Philosophy at Peking University. She was a teacher for twenty three years in China before migrating to Australia in 1988. She has published in both China and in Australia, and in 2003 won the World Chinese Literature Award'.

Professor Huang Yuanshen studied in Australia completing a Master of Arts degree at the University of Sydney in 1981. He has published several books on Australian literature, notably A History of Australian Literature, Australian Culture in Review, Contemporary Australian Society and An Anthology of Australian Literature. He has worked as Director at the Australian Studies Centre, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China and has served as Visiting Professor at the University of Sydney, La Trobe University and Pennsylvania State University. He has managed key Australian partnerships at LaTrobe University and Monash University's Gippsland campus.

In 2007, he was professor of English at Shanghai Institute of Foreign Trade. Previously, Professor Huang was the President of the National Association of Australian Studies in China.

Mabel Lee was born in western New South Wales (NSW) and was raised in Sydney's western suburbs. She attended the University of Sydney and taught Chinese Studies there from 1966-2000 becoming Associate Professor in Chinese Studies. She later retained an honorary position in the School of European, Asian and Middle East Languages. Her particular field has been twentieth-century Chinese literature and history. As a leading authority on Paris-based writer/critic Gao Xingjian and the writing of Australasian-based poet Yang Lian, she has translated contemporary Chinese works into English. These include Gao Xingjian's novel Soul Mountain, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000. In 2001 she was awarded also the PEN Medallion.

Lee co-founded Wild Peony Press and was a member the editorial board of Literature and Aesthetics, the journal of the Sydney Aesthetics Society. She has been co-editor of two University of Sydney series, The East Asian Series and the World Literature Series, with a desire to promote greater understanding of 'Asian' peoples in the English-speaking world. She has contributed to several books on Chinese grammar and language.

Miriam Lo was born in Canada and from age three to nineteen was raised in Singapore, where she obtained 'O' and 'A' levels in Secondary Education and acquired considerable fluency in Mandarin Chinese. Of Malaysian-Chinese descent through her father and Australian descent through her mother, she settled in Australia, gaining a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Western Australia and a Master of Arts degree from the University of Queensland (UQ). She enrolled also at UQ as a postgraduate student for a Doctor of Philsophy degree.

Lo has worked as a kindergarten teacher, research assistant to a merchant bank, student librarian, tutor, babysitter and poetry workshop convenor. She has given readings of poetry for Interactions: The Eighth Biennial Symposium on Literatures and Cultures of the Asia Pacific Region (1997), As Good As It Gets? Postgraduate Work-In-Progress Conference, UQ (1998), Asian-Australian Conference, Canberra (1999), and Subverse Queensland Poetry Festival (1999 and 2000). Lo was also a member of the panel discussion Written on the Face: Identity and Australian Poetry for the Subverse 2000 Queensland Poetry Festival.

Lawrence Wong was born into a family of Chinese origin in Ba Xuyen Province in Vietnam. He graduated from the Cho Lon Fukien Middle School. His family fled war-torn Vietnam and arrived first in Indonesia in 1978 and then Australia the next year.

Wong has acted as editor-in-chief for newspapers and magazines in Australia and he has been deputy director and program host for the Melbourne-based TV station - Channel 31.

Since 1988 he has published Chinese-language books including novels, poetry and essays and he has won literary awards in Australia and overseas. He participated in the 'Straight Emotions' program, Radio Beijing in 1996, and his works have been read at the Chinese Museum in Melbourne and at the Melbourne Arts Festival.

Chinese translator of Australian literature. Professor Li Yao graduated from Inner Mongolian Normal University in 1966, and in 1980 Professor Li Yao was introduced to Henry Lawson's Favourite Stories (1976, compiled by Walter Stone) by Western Australian Alison Hewitt who was teaching English at the Inner Mongolian University in China at that time. Li Yao began translating the first story in the compilation, 'The Drover's Wife'. Inspired by Lawson and by Patrick White's The Tree of Man, also given to him by Hewitt, Li Yao dedicated himself to the translation of Australian literature and played an important role in promoting the study of Australian literature within China.

Li was the inaugural winner of the Australia-China Council Translation Prize, which he won for his translation of Alex Miller's The Ancestor Game. Among other awards, he was the winner of the Australia-China Council 2012 Book Prize for his translation of Alexis Wright's Carpentaria; and, the Australia-China Council Golden Medallion for his significant contribution to Australian Literature.

Professor Li received a Doctor of Letters degree from University of Sydney in April, 2014. He is also a Visiting Professor of Beijing Foreign Studies University, a Member of the Writers' Association of China, and a Council Member of the Australian Studies Association of China, since 2008. In 2018, he produced a series of 'Ten Volumes of Australian Literature'.

Source: Crossings : Bulletin of the International Australian Studies Association 12.1 (2007)

Jennifer Martiniello is an award winning poet, writer, visual artist and academic of 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 has worked extensively with Indigenous Australian communities and youth in regional New South Wales and Victoria. In 2005 she was the public officer of the Indigenous Writers Support Group in Canberra, Indigenous Advisor on Youth Programs for the Duke of Edinburgh Awards in Australia for the Australian Capital Territory Advisory Committee, a member of the Advisory Committee of the Australian Centre for Indigenous History at the Australian National University and a member of the Publishing Advisory Committee of Aboriginal Studies Press at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.

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. In 2002 she received an ACT Creative Arts Fellowship to complete her novel Blossoms of the Mulga, to illustrate her children's book Fish and Rainbow and to take up residencies at Varuna Writers' Centre and at Hedgebrook Women Writer's Retreat in Seattle, USA. She was also coordinating editor for issue one of New Dreamings: Indigenous Youth Magazine, 2002. Her poetry has been translated into Spanish, Polish and Arabic.

Ding Xiaoqi was separated from her parents during the Cultural Revolution in China and lived alone for five years: her actor-father was gaoled, while her mother was sent to the countryside for re-education. From 1977 to 1989, she worked as a stage director and lyricist for the Navy Song and Dance Troupe. In 1986 she graduated from the People's Liberation Army Arts Academy with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Chinese Literature. Between 1984 and 1989 she wrote several short stories and novellas; she also wrote the screenplay for Army Nurse, the film version of her story Maidenhome. Some of the short stories that would later be published in Maidenhome (1993) soon began appearing in issues of Australian Short Stories. In 1990 she was appointed Visiting Fellow in the Cinema Studies Division of La Trobe University. From 1990 to 1993 she was Artistic Director of the Chinese International Arts Festival in Melbourne. She has written two unpublished plays about the lives of Chinese students in Australia: The Gate to Paradise (1991) and Kiss Yesterday Goodbye (1992). Both were staged in Melbourne by the Chinese-language Gold Mountain Theatre Group.

In 1996, with Ouyang Yu , she co-founded Otherland, Australia's first Chinese-language literary journal. She has worked as a novelist, stage director, screenwriter, lyricist and poet with extensive credits in China. Much of her writing is focussed on everyday issues in the lives of women in contemporary Chinese society.

Emily Sun's ancestors lived in a village in the south of China. Her visit to Beijing to get in touch with her ethnic origins is recorded in her essay 'Oxygen'. Raised and educated in Perth, Western Australia, Sun later trained as a teacher.

In 2008, she was profiled in the Sunday Times Magazine (June 2008) alongside Simone Lazaroo and other Asian-Australian authors, all of whom were contributors to Alice Pung's Growing up Asian in Australia.

Additional Works:

[Visual poem], panels 4-6 of the 6 Ages of Women, in collaboration with artist C. Jupp: Hecate 41.1-2 (2015).

Julie Hsia Chang has published widely and was a very well known writer in Taiwan before emigrating to Australia in the 1980s. Since her arrival in Australia and as a resident of Melbourne, Chang has published several works relating experiences of newcomers to a foreign country. In addition, she has written travel literature and essays on social life in Australia. She has served as chief editor of Chinese Culture in The Diaspora Newsletter.

In her memoir Writing in Australia Julie Hsia Chang writes: '...when our children were still at school, the two young brothers always came home with a never-ending fund of things to talk about at the dinner table ... I listened attentively and wrote it down bit by bit. Later on I wrote a series of special columns, eighty in all, based on my sons' experiences growing up in a foreign country. They were published in Chinese newspapers in Taiwan and the United States. They received an enthusiastic response, and later on the columns were collected into two books, The Adventures of Two Brothers in Australia and The Land Where the Kangaroo Hops.' ( p. 81-82)

She is the mother of Kaiwen Zhang and Andi Zhang.

Sang Ye was born as Shen Dajun. During the Cultural Revolution his school was closed and his parents were sent to the countryside for re-education. In 1971 he commenced employment as an apprentice at an electrical engineering plant and remained there for several years. By 1980 he was working as a journalist and in 1983 he collaborated on a major literary project with novelist Zhang Xinxin. Together they toured China, conducting interviews with hundreds of people and recording an oral history of the major events of the century. Their work was published in China as Beijingren (1986) and published in the West the following year as Chinese Lives. (Sang's fascination with travel and oral history has influenced much of his later work in Australia.)

In 1987 Sang Ye visited Australia at the invitation of the Australia-China Council and the Literature Board of the Australia Council. While in Australia he met Sue Trevaskes, whom he later married. They returned to China in 1988, and Sang Ye collected documentation of the Cultural Revolution, most of which is now held in the National Library of Australia. On 7 June 1989, following the Tiananmen Square massacre, Sang Ye and Trevaskes fled China with the assistance of Australian novelist Nicholas Jose (q.v.). Sang and his family settled in Queensland. Excerpts from his work Chinese Time have appeared in Meanjin and Heat.

(Leo) Xi Rang Liu, who writes under the name of Liu Ao, studied Chinese Literature and graduated from Beijing Normal University. He worked in China as a journalist and editor.

In 1989, Liu emigrated to Australia where he became an Australian citizen and undertook further studies including a Bachelor of Business at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and a Graduate Diploma in Professional Writing at Deakin University. Working for the Australian Taxation Office, he has also pursued a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in Creative Writing. He has translated works from English to Chinese and Chinese to English.

His novels have won recognition in the Federation of Overseas Chinese Associations Literary Awards, Taiwan, and in Australia he has been the recipient of Writer's Grants from the Australian Council. As well as his novels he has written plays for radio, television and stage, and was commissioned to translate the Agathie Christie inspired anthology Malice Domestic 9 into Chinese.