Shirley Geok-lin Lim (b. 1944, Malacca) is one of Hong Kong's most-published writers as well as Chair Professor of English and head of the English Department at the University of Hong Kong and Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.Her first collection of poems, Crossing The Peninsula, published by Heinemann Press in 1980, won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, a first both for an Asian and for a woman. Her memoir Among the White Moon Faces received the 1997 American Book Award.
Shirley Lim's long-awaited first novel, Joss and Gold, to be published in mid-2001, traces the uncoventional development of an extended and unlikely family, struggling to find common ground across distances of time and culture. At the center of the engaging "un-love" story is Li An, a smart and strong-willed Malaysian woman of Chinese descent. The conflicts that surround Li An in the politically charged atmosphere of Kuala Lumpur in 1969 intersect with her own internal contradictions. Although she supports her nation's struggle to build its own identity after decades of British colonial rule, she cannot renounce her love for the English poetry she teaches .... (more)
Shirley Geok-lin Lim's first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula (1980), received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She has published four volumes of poetry subsequently: No Man's Grove (1985); Modern Secrets (1989); Monsoon History (1994), which is a retrospective selection of her work; and What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say (1998).She has also published three books of short stories and a memoir, Among the White Moon Faces (1996), which received the 1997 American Book Award. Lim's co-edited anthology, The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women's Anthology (1989), also received the American Book Award. She has published two critical studies, Writing South East/Asia in English: Against the Grain (1994), and Nationalism and Literature: Writing in English from the Philippines and Singapore (1993), and has edited/co-edited many critical volumes.
She was interviewed by Bill Moyers for a PBS special on American poetry, "Fooling with Words" in 1999; several of her poems may be read on-line on the PBS site.
In the last 2 years, she has edited/co-edited Transnational Asia Pacific (University of Illinois Press), Power, Race and Gender in Academe (MLA Press); Asian American Literature: An Anthology (NTC/Contemporary Publishers); and Tilting the Continent (New Rovers Press).
Shirley Geok-Lim Lim is the author or editor of more than a dozen works of poetry and non-fiction. Her first novel, Joss and Gold is being published in mid-2001.
Review/purchase books by Shirley Lim at Paddyfield.com
Read an excerpt from Among the White Moon Faces.
Shirley Lim's page at the University of Hong Kong includes links to on-line articles and current research and course work.
E-mail Shirley Lim