The Kingsbury Tales

Description

Kingsbury, Victoria is where poet Ouyang Yu has been based since he came from the People's Republic of China in 1991. It was here where he first came into contact and conflict with a very different culture and multiculture. Set primarily in Australia, spiralling out of the Melbourne suburb of Kingsbury, and China with its 5000-year history, the slippage of identity is explored, and how societies invest or alter identity, is constantly under examination.The Kingsbury Tales explores and depicts poetic characters in a similar way that Geoffrey Chaucer did many hundreds years ago in The Canterbury Tales. Ouyang Yu's The Kingsbury Tales are the poems of a traveller, an exile, a displaced poet, and a poet of two homes. The tension between these factors drives the poetry of this book.

Ouyang Yu graduated from La Trobe University with a doctoral degree in Australian literature and has had 32 Chinese and English books published in the field of fiction, poetry, literary translation and literary criticism. His first novel in English, The Eastern Slope Chronicle (Brandl & Schlesinger) was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Awards and won the SA Festival Award for Innovation in Writing. Ouyang Yu is professor of Australian literature and director of Australian Studies Centre in the English Department, School of Foreign Languages and Literature, Wuhan University, China, and lives between Melbourne and China.

"It might be hyperbolic to compare Lau Siew Mei with Garcia Marquez, but she deserves every accolade." --"Singapore Times" "It is not unreasonable to speak of Lau Siew Mei in the same breath as the formidable Brian Castro with his string of awards, his knotty, erudite, postmodern fictions." --Katherine England, book reviewer, "Advertiser "