INFO
| Name | Grace Yee (she/her) |
| Country of Birth | Hong Kong |
| Place of Residence | Naarm Melbourne |
| Ethnicities | Chinese (Cantonese) |
| Artform | Literature |
| Decades Active | 2000s, 2010s, 2020s |
ABOUT
Grace Yee is a writer, researcher and award-winning poet who lives in Melbourne on Wurundjeri land. Her writing is threaded with rich historical detail that reflects careful research, paying attention to familial dynamics and the details of everyday life. Her work has been anthologised and published in Overland, Meanjin, Poetry New Zealand Yearbook, and Best of Australian Poems 2021 and 2022, as well as The Shanghai Literary Review and the Cordite Poetry Review, among others.
Raised in Aotearoa, Yee is Cantonese Chinese, and some of her writing draws on the experiences of settler Cantonese Chinese families in Aotearoa and Australia, grounded in research undertaken in archives and libraries. Yee has taught writing at Deakin University and the University of Melbourne, where she completed a PhD in 2016, focusing on settler Chinese women’s storytelling in Aotearoa. Between 2019 and 2021, she undertook a Creative Fellowship at the State Library of Victoria, where she delved into the histories of Chinese settlers in Australia.
In June 2023, Yee’s first collection, Chinese Fish, was published by Giramondo. Chinese Fish is a verse novel that follows the lives of three generations of Chinese women in Aotearoa. It weaves together multiple voices with text sourced from archives such as newspapers, legislation and advertisements. Acclaimed for its formal experimentation — “it leaps across genres and forms, sometimes on a single page” — Chinese Fish won several significant awards in both Aotearoa and Australia. In 2024, Yee was awarded the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, as well as the ceremony’s top honour, the Victorian Prize for Literature. In Aotearoa, Chinese Fish was the winner of the Poetry prize at the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
Yee’s second book of poetry, Joss: A History, is inspired by the lives of Cantonese sojourners who are now interred in Bendigo, and other early “Chinese communities in white settler nations around the Pacific Rim”. It is forthcoming with Giramondo Publishing.
LINKS
Key works / presentations
2023 — Chinese Fish, Giramondo Publishing
Key awards
2024 — Ockham New Zealand Book Award: Prize for Poetry (Chinese Fish)
2024 — Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards: Prize for Literature (Chinese Fish)
2024 — Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards: Prize for Poetry (Chinese Fish)
2020 — Westerly Magazine: Patricia Hackett Prize (‘for the chinese merchants of melbourne’)
2020 —University of Melbourne: Peter Steele Poetry Award (‘Beneath the Long White Cloud’)
2019–2021 — State Library of Victoria Creative Fellowship (‘the Chinese Question’)
