Alison Wong is a novelist and poet, now writing a family memoir. In the late 1800s and early 1900s her great grandparents and grandparents on both sides moved back and forth between Guangdong and New Zealand. Alison was born in Hastings and grew up in nearby Napier on the east coast of New Zealand's North Island. After studying at Victoria University of Wellington, she spent 1983 to 1985 on a NZ-China Student Exchange Scholarship at Xiamen University. She worked in IT in Wellington, spent 1994 in Shanghai, then returned to Wellington to write. She currently lives in Geelong, Australia, but returns to New Zealand often.
A graduate of Victoria University's creative writing programme, Alison was awarded the 1996 NZ Founder's Society Research Award, a 1996 Reader's Digest NZ Society of Authors Stout Research Centre Fellowship and the 2002 Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago. Her poetry collection, Cup, was shortlisted for Best First Book for Poetry at the 2007 Montana NZ Book Awards and her novel, As the Earth Turns Silver, won the 2010 NZ Post Book Awards for Fiction. It was also shortlisted for the 2010 Australian Prime Minister's Literary Award and the 2010 Nielsen Bookdata NZ Booksellers Choice Award. It was nominated for the 2011 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and selected by the NZ Listener and the Sunday Star-Times as one of 2009's best books.
Alison's work has been published in numerous anthologies and journals, including the Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature, New Zealand's China Experience, 150 Essential New Zealand Poems, 99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry, Best New Zealand Poems, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, Landfall, Sport, Griffith Review, Meanjin and Asian Cha. She founded and ran Porirua's popular, but now defunct, Poetry Café, for which she was awarded a Porirua City Civic Award. She was Arts Finalist for the 2010 Wellington of the Year.
Alison's love of poetry and language is reflected in her prose. Her work often explores themes of family, love, identity, belonging and cross-cultural relationships, drawing on both New Zealand and Chinese heritages. As the Earth Turns Silver is set from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries in Wellington, Dunedin, Guangdong and the Western Front during WWI. The story of a relationship between a Chinese man and European woman, the novel is told from multiple Chinese and European perspectives. The Irish Times wrote, 'There is an unusual intelligence about this subtle, crafted novel that forces one to stop and absorb the enormity of the smallest gesture.' The Sunday Star-Times wrote, 'Poet novelist Wong deploys artful pacing, characterisation, and use of the unsaid. Recalibrate your heart with The English Patient of Wellington's World War One Chinatown.'