Poetry Shelf Lounge: Alison Wong reads and discusses her poem ‘Earth’
By NZ Poetry Shelf | Posted:
Alison Wong reads and discusses ‘Earth’ (published in Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand edited by Paula Morris, Michelle Elvy and James Norcliffe, with art editor David Eggleton (Otago University Press, 2020)
A fourth generation New Zealander, Alison Wong grew up in Hawke’s Bay and has lived most of her life in Wellington. She now lives in Geelong, Australia and goes back and forth across the Tasman. Her poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction are translated and published internationally. Her poetry collection, Cup (Steele Roberts), was shortlisted for Best First Book for Poetry at the 2007 NZ Book Awards. Her novel, As the Earth Turns Silver (Penguin NZ; Picador Australia/UK), won the Fiction Award at the 2010 New Zealand Post Book Awards and was shortlisted for the 2010 Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. In 2018 Booksellers NZ voted the novel one of the twenty bestsellers of the decade. She held the 2002 Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago, the 2014 Shanghai International Writers’ Residency and the 2016 Sun Yat Sen University International Writers’ Residency. An NZ Society of Authors mentor, she was a poetry judge at the 2018 Ockham NZ Book Awards and in 2020 a consulting editor for the Asian NZ arts and cultural site Hainamana. She is co-editor with Paula Morris of the first anthology of Asian NZ creative writing, A Clear Dawn: Asian NZ New Voices (AUP), which will be launched at the Auckland Writers’ Festival in May 2021.