Alison Wong

INFO

Name	Alison Wong (she/her)
Born	1960
Country of Birth	Aotearoa
Place of Residence	Djilang Geelong
Ethnicities	Chinese (Cantonese)
Artform	Literature
Decades Active	1990s, 2000s, 2010s, 2020s

ABOUT

Alison Wong is a poet, novelist and creative non-fiction writer whose first novel, As the Earth Turns Silver (2009), received the Fiction Award at the 2010 New Zealand Post Book Awards — the first and only Asian writer to have won this national award since its inception in 1968.

Born in Heretaunga Hastings, raised in Ahuriri Napier, and spending most of her adult life in Pōneke Wellington and Pari-ā-Rua Porirua, Wong is a fourth-generation New Zealander. Her great-grandparents migrated from Zengcheng/Jung Seng/Jāngsìhng (增城), Guangdong/Gwóngdūng in the late nineteenth century and, in A Clear Dawn, she shares how her maternal great-grandfather, Huang Guomin/Wòhng Gwokmàhn (黃國民) was called back to China to be county magistrate, while her paternal great-grandfather, Huang Weijin/Wòhng Wàihjeun (黃維進) was murdered at his fruit shop on Adelaide Road in Wellington, on September 12, 1914. “The case was never solved,” she wrote in an essay in The Griffith Review.

In 2001 she founded and ran the monthly event Poetry Cafe in Porirua with Lindsay Forbes, which led to them receiving a Porirua City Council Civic Honour Award for their work. Wong was then awarded the Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago in 2002. “I received letters of congratulation from Chinese I’d never met from all over New Zealand,” she recalls in an interview:

Before the Burns Fellowship, I felt like I didn’t quite belong in the community. I felt different and alone. Almost no other Chinese New Zealanders seemed interested in literature. But then I realised that it mattered. That the community did want their stories told. And that they identified with any success I had.

Her first collection of poetry, Cup, was published in 2006 and was shortlisted for Best First Book at the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Writing in The Lumiere Reader, Megan Fleming describes the book as “intensely personal… there are the details of domestic moments, the wonder of a new child, the falling out of love — but she lends these subjects a humble and attentive form, drawing the reader in, to rest in the space between.” In her book Wild Honey, Paula Green describes the collection as “original, lyrical, wise — releases far more than it holds in.”

In 2009, Wong published her debut novel, As The Earth Turns Silver, a historical work set in early 1900s Wellington exploring Chinese-Pākehā relationships. The novel received the Fiction Award at the 2010 New Zealand Post Book Awards and the 2009 Janet Frame Fiction Prize, as well as being shortlisted for the 2010 Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.

During the pandemic, Wong co-edited with Paula Morris A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand (AUP, 2021) an anthology of poetry, fiction and essays by 75 early career Aotearoa Asian writers. In the introduction to this book, they write, “After all the reading, a prediction: New Zealand literature will be utterly transformed over the next twenty years by the burgeoning talent and accomplishment of our Asian writers.”

Wong has a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Victoria University of Wellington and studied and worked in China during the 1980s and '90s. In 2010 she moved to Geelong, Australia, where she is still based.