Ouyang Yu

Australian poet, novelist and critic

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), 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. On 29/02/2004, this book won the Festival Award for Innovation in Writing at the 2004 Adelaide Bank Festival of Arts, apart from being short-listed for the Community Relations Commission Award, NSW Premier's Literary Awards in 2003. The book is now put on the syllabus in the English Department, University of Sydney. 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.

(By Wenche Ommundsen)

Further reading
For a fuller bibliographical record, see Austlit: Australian Literature Gateway (www.austlit.edu.au).
See also Wenche Ommundsen, 'Not for the faint-hearted. Ouyang Yu: The angry Chinese poet', Meanjin, Vol. 57, no. 3, 1998, 595-609; Qian Chaoying, 'Death in the "New Chinese Literature" of Australia', in Ommundsen, Wenche, ed. Bastard Moon: Essays on Chinese-Australian Writing, Melbourne: Otherland 2001, pp. 225-242; Lyn Jacobs, 'About Face: Asian-Australians at Home', Australian Literary Studies, vol. 20, no. 3, May 2002, pp. 201-214.

For more details about Ouyang Yu, see the information below:

Originally from P.R. China, Ouyang Yu holds a doctorate in Australian literature from La Trobe University, Melbourne. His English poems have been widely published in Australia, U.S.A., U.K., Canada and New Zealand, and his Chinese poems have been published in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia and the U.S.A. He has five collections of English poetry published, Moon over Melbourne and Other Poems (1995), Songs of the Last Chinese Poet (1997), which was short-listed for the 1999 N.S.W. Premier's Literary Awards, Two Hearts, Two Tongues and Rain-Coloured Eyes (Wild Peony Press, 2002) Foreign Matter (Otherland Publishing, 2003), and Ouyang Yu: Selected Poems (forthcoming with Salt Publishing in UK, 2003). He has four collections of Chinese poetry published as well, Summer in Melbourne (Chongqing Publishing House, 1998), Cunt Sequence (Otherland Publishing, 2000), Wo Cao (Otherland Publishing, 2003) and The Limit (forthcoming with Poem Reference, 2003).

Ouyang's literary work in English including poetry, fiction, essays and literary translations has appeared in all the major Australian literary journals such as Meanjin, Overland, Heat, Southerly, Westerly, Island, Eureka Street, the Age newspaper, The Australian Book Review, The Australian Review of Books, Siglo, Southern Review, Northern Perspective, Meridian, LiNQ, Scarp, Going Down Swinging, Imago, Famous Reporter, Veranda, and overseas journals like Antipodes (USA), Papyrus (USA), Tin Fish (USA), Atlanta Review (USA), Hawaii Pacific Review (USA), Indiana Review (USA), Janus Head (USA), Other Poetry (UK), The New Writer (UK), Salt (UK), Agender (UK), Buzzwords (UK), Prop Magazine (UK), Poetry Ireland (Ireland), Descant (Canada), Ariel (Canada), Filling Station (Canada), Kunapipi (Denmark and UK), JAAM (New Zealand), Poetry NZ (New Zealand) and Takahe (New Zealand), as well as a dozen Australian literary anthologies, including Influence, Fathers in Writing, Picador New Writing, Eat Tongue, From Yellow Earth to Eucalypt, Footprints on Paper, Sharing Fruit: An Anthology of Asian and Australian Writing, Australian Mosaic: An Anthology of Multicultural Writing, Exploring Australia, New Music: An Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry (2001) and, most recently, Sunlines: an Anthology of Australian Poetry (2002).

The Chinese magazines that have published him include Poem Reference, People's Literature, Frontier, Hong Kong Literature, Chung Wai Literary Monthly, World Literature, Youth Literature, Tianjin Literature, Shanxi Literature, Yan He, Fei Tian, Shanghai Literature, Fiction World (Shanghai), Central China Daily (Taipei), The Independence Daily (Sydney), New World Poetry (USA), First Lines (New York) and many others that are based in the mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, the United States of America and Australia.

His published translations into Chinese include The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1991, PRC; new edition 2002 in PRC), Fly Away Peter by David Malouf (1994, PRC), Tirra Lirra by the River by Jessica Anderson (1996, PRC), The Ancestor Game by Alex Miller (1996, Taiwan), The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead (1999, PRC), for which he was awarded the top literary translation grant in 1998 by the Australia Council, Julia Paradise by Rod Jones (1999, PRC), That Eye, the Sky by Tim Winton (1999, PRC), Capricornia by Xavier Herbert (forthcoming with Chonqing Publishing House in 2003), for which he was again awarded the top literary translation grant in 1998 by the Australia Society of Authors, The Whole Woman by Germaine Greer (2002 in China with Baihua Publishing House) and The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes (January 2003). His translation from Chinese into English is Bitter Peaches and Plums (co-translated with Bruce Jacobs), published in 1996 by Monash University Press, and In Your Face: Contemporary Chinese Poetry in English Translation (Otherland Publishing, 2002)

In 1998, his monograph in English, Representations of Australia and the Australian in the Chinese and Hong Kongese Media from 1985 to 1995, was published by Centre for the Studies of Australian-Asian Relationship, University of Queensland. His scholarly book in Chinese, Representing the Other: Chinese in Australian Fiction: 1888-1988, was published by Xinhua Publishing House in China in June 2000. His first Chinese novel, The Angry Wu Zili, was published in December, 1999, by an underground Chinese press. He is now editing Otherland, the first and the only Chinese-English bilignual literary journal in Australia, eight issues of which have been published since its inception in 1996, the sixth issue being bilingual, the 7th issue, a special English issue on contemporary Chinese writing in Australia, titled Bastard Moon: Essays on Chinese-Australian Writing, guest-edited by Dr Wenche Ommundsen, was published in July 2001 and the 8th issue, another special edition, of Chinese poetry, titled In Your Face: Contemporary Chinese Poetry in English Translation, edited, introduced and translated by Ouyang, was published in 2002 ; the magazine is being subscribed to by various libraries in the world including Harvard University, Yale University, National Library of New Zealand and National Library of Australia.

In 1999, Ouyang Yu was awarded a grant by AsiaLink to be writer in residence at Beijing University, China, as part of AsiaLink Asia Residence Program to write his non-fictional book, On the Smell of an Oily Rag: Notes on the Margins, part of which has appeared in Heat and Meridian, and his first English novel, The Eastern Slope Chronicle, assisted with a grant from Arts Victoria in 1999, has had a number of chapters published in Southerly, Overland, Westerly, Imago and LiNQ, and was published in 2002 in Sydney by its publisher Brandl & Schlesinger; it was short-listed for the 2003 NSW Premier's Literary Prizes in the category of Community Relations Commission Award. He won a grant from Arts Victoria to assist him in the writing of his second novel, Loose: a Wild History, in 2001, now finished, and awaiting publication by anyone who may be interested in it. In November 2001, Ouyang was awarded a major Australia Council grant for his third novel on which he is currently working.

Ouyang Yu has been invited to a number of major regional or international writer's festivals, Melbourne Writer's Festival (1992, 1993 and 2000), Sydney Writer's Festival (1997), Melbourne Poetry Festival (1999 and 2001), Queensland Festival Poetry "Subverse 2000", Tasmanian Poetry Festival (5-7 October 2001), World Congress of Poets (7-12 October 2001), Hong Kong International Literary Festival (April 2002), Asian American Studies Conference at University of California at Berkeley (29 November 2002), the Tasmania Literary Festival in March 2003 (29/3/03 to 6/4/03), the Sydney Writers Festival in May 2003 (19/05/03 to 25/05/03) and a forthcoming literary festival in Denmark (April 2004), not to mention numerous international conferences, small city-based festivals and readings in Melbourne and Sydney.

Ouyang Yu judged the Victorian Premier's Literary Award in 2000 in the literary translation category and he examined PhD theses on literature for various Australian universities. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Faculty of Arts, Deakin University (1999-2001) and is now a postdoctoral fellow at Deakin University (2003).

To date, Ouyang Yu has had 26 books published, covering all fields of literature, from poetry to fiction to non-fiction to literary translation, in both Chinese and English languages, throughout the Chinese and English speaking worlds. His work has been published by some of the major Chinese publishers and literary journals including the Hong Kongese and Taiwanese ones; the number of magazines that have published him throughout the world exceed 100 and he has been widely anthologised in Australia as well. Ouyang's English work has also been translated into Polish, Swedish and Chinese languages.