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Alison Wong's great grandparents came to New Zealand from Guangdong province in China in the 1890s. She grew up in Hawke's Bay, studied mathematics at Victoria Univerity of Wellington, worked in IT, and spent several years in China. She has received a number of awards and fellowships, including the 2002 Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago, a New Zealand Founders Society Research Award and a Readers Digest-New Zealand Society of Authors Stout Research Centre Fellowship. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in journals and anthologies in New Zealand, Australia and the USA, and her poetry has been broadcast on New Zealand's National Radio. Her first poetry collection cup was published by Steele Roberts in early 2006. Alison was a founder of Porirua's popular live poetry venue Poetry Cafe, and has read her fiction and poetry throughout New Zealand, including at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, in Wellington for the NZ Poetry Society, in Christchurch for National Poetry Day, and in Dunedin for the Wordstruck! Literary Festival. She has also given talks and seminars and participated in panel discussions for the Hocken Library New Zealand Studies Centre, the Stout Research Centre Chinese New Zealand Seminar series, the Stout Research Centre Alexander Turnbull Library conference Unfolding Chinese New Zealand: Emerging Voices , and the University of Otago Cultural Transformations Symposium Transforming Tradition Π Cultures on the Move. Alison lives overlooking the sea in Porirua City, Wellington, where she is working on a novel. ALISON WONG's poetry is deceptively simple. Her first book is a collection
of intensely personal poems, filled with imagery crafted in clear language.
The subject matter is mostly accessible: there are the details of domestic
moments, the wonder of a new child, the falling out of love Π but she
lends these subjects a humble and attentive form, drawing the reader
in, to rest in the space between. Wong's background in mathematics
comes across in her poetry, not as a subject, but in the careful formula
of words to white space... ... the water landscape enters her work in delicate detailed allusions...
she brings to her emotional references a wry ironic openness... Many
of the poems describe sea, the moon, the natural landscape in a way
which reminds the reader of Chinese landscape painting, one view piled
upon another... Her mastery of the descriptive phrase, especially in
natural settings, is excellent... Wong is a poet to be reckoned with. |