Ouyang Yu
Author photo by Alex Miller.
Shearsman Titles
Moon Over Melbourne
About the author
Born in Huangzhou, Hubei, in the People's Republic of China, Ouyang Yu completed an MA in English and Australian Literature in Shanghai and worked as an interpreter, translator and lecturer in China. He came to Australia in 1991 to complete a PhD at La Trobe University, Melbourne, on the representation of the Chinese in Australian fiction (awarded 1995). He writes in both English and Chinese. Best known for his poetry, he has also written fiction and criticism in both languages, and has translated over a dozen major Australian literary texts into Chinese.
Ouyang's best-known works in English are his poetry collections Moon Over Melbourne and Other Poems (1995, 2nd revised edn 2005), Songs of the Last Chinese Poet (1997, short-listed for the 1999 New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards) and Two Hearts, Two Tongues and Rain-Coloured Eyes (2002). His first novel, The Eastern Slope Chronicle, was published in 2002. He is the founding editor of Otherland, the first (and only) bilingual journal of Chinese-Australian writing. He has won a number of major grants for fiction, non-fiction, poetry and translation.
Ouyang is a controversial figure within Australian literature, sometimes characterised as 'the angry Chinese poet.' His work captures the frustrations (personal, social, professional and sexual) of the migrant experience and hits out at the indifference and hostility with which Australia has greeted recent waves of Asian immigration. He writes with insight about the dilemmas of transnational artists and intellectuals caught between different literary, cultural and linguistic traditions. His raw, uncompromising style (according to one critic, the 'deliberate unloveliness' of his language) challenges literary as well as social establishments at the same time as it engages in courageous acts of introspection and self-criticism. Ouyang typifies the new generation of post-colonial writers and intellectuals who can write with detachment about the forces of globalisation and their impact on East-West relations and at the same time acknowledge their complex and often painful impact on their own life and work.
(Wenche Omundsen)