Ouyang Yu is an award-winning poet and novelist. His first novel, The Eastern Slope Chronicle, won the 2004 South Australian Festival Award for Innovation in Writing. His third novel, The English Class, won the 2011 NSW Premier’s Award, and his 14th collection of poetry, Terminally Poetic (2020), won the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for a Poetry Book in the 2021 Queensland Literary Awards.
He was shortlisted for the Writer’s Prize in the 2021 Melbourne Prize for Literature and won the Fellowship from Creative Australia in late 2021 for writing a documentary novel, now complete in three volumes. And his eighth novel, All the Rivers Run South, was published in December 2023 by Puncher & Wattmann, which is also publishing his ninth novel, The Sun at Eight or Nine in mid-2024, and his first collection of short stories, The White Cockatoo Flowers, was out in early 2024 with Transit Lounge Publishing.
His website: www.huangzhouren.com and his blog: youyang2.blogspot.com
Author Insight
Why do you write? This is like asking why do you breathe? I write, therefore I am.
What would you be doing if you weren’t a writer? I would be teaching and/or translating.
What was your toughest obstacle to becoming published? I don’t know. Every book I wrote tends to be hard to get published despite my best intentions and efforts.
What’s the best aspect of your writing life? Producing my best work in one go without changing a single word.
—the worst? Don’t really know, actually. All the stuff that I’ve written that remains unpublished may not be the worst except that it may take years, and posthumously, to get it seen or read. In that sense, that may be ‘the worst’ part of it.
What would you do differently if you were starting out now as a writer? That’s an impossible question because if I were starting out now I had already published so much and known so much; I’d approach the whole thing very differently from before. But it would be the same as what I keep telling my writing students: Write daily and submit it everywhere. Anything unpublishable now may be published over time, possibly decades after.
What do you wish you’d been told before you set out to become an author? No idea. But even if I started now, I’d start from zero and there’s no one giving any advice, one having only one’s own heart to follow.
What’s the best advice you were ever given? ‘There is no money in poetry,’ from a writer friend. And yet, I produce it daily.
Do you experience ‘writer’s block’ and if so, how do you overcome it? When I was young, I either wrote or didn’t. There was no such block. As I’m getting old, I don’t have any writer’s block. Writing always finds me writing, anytime, anywhere, even in sleep.
How do you deal with rejection? I write about it. Refer to my book of poetry, Terminally Poetic. There are heaps of poems about rejection.
In three words, how would you describe your writing? Imaginative, poetic, and philosophical.
If you had the chance to spend an hour with any writer of your choice, living or dead, who would it be and what would you most like them to tell you about living a writing life? E. M. Cioran and Samuel Beckett. It’s the darkest of their thoughts that keep moving me but I don’t need them to tell me how to live a writing life; no one can however good they are.
Book Byte
On The White Cockatoo Flowers, a Self-review
by Ouyang Yu
- From memory, ‘The Wolves from the North’ is the first story I got published in English in Australia. It was published in Australian Short Stories, no. 52, 1995, pp. 29-35.
2. And ‘The White Cockatoo Flower’ was my second story published in English, included in Influence: Australian Voices, edited by Peter Skrzynecki and published by Transworld Publishing, 1997, pp. 171-9.
3. Even though they were published in English, they were in fact originally written in Chinese, my native tongue, much earlier, and then I self-translated them into English.
4. This can be seen from the following fact that the two stories had been published in Chinese in a Shanghai-based literary magazine, Fiction World, both in 1994, the first one in No. 2, and the second in No. 5.
One short story, ‘bai yingwuhua’ (The White Cockatoo Flower) [《白鹦鹉花》], xiaoshuo jie (Fiction World) ) [《小说界》] (Shanghai), no. 5, 1994, pp. 174-7, and donghua shibao (Chinese Herald) [《东华时报》] (Sydney), 7-12 March, 1995, p. 11.
One short story, ‘beifang de lang’ (Wolves from the North) [《北方的狼》], published in xiaoshuo jie (Fiction World) [《小说界》] (Shanghai), No., 2, 1994, pp. 183-186.
5. The rest of the collection, except the novella at the end, was written in English, my father tongue if the Chinese is my mother tongue, written across a span of some two decades before they were submitted and finally accepted and published by the Transit Lounge Publishing, my favourite publisher who had previously published my collection of poetry, Self Translation (2012), The English Class (2010) and, later, Billy Sing (2017).
6. Island, the novella, was originally written in Chinese in the late 1980s in Shanghai where I was studying at a university for my MA degree in Australian literature. It was not till I arrived in Australia in the early 1990s and began my PhD studies at La Trobe University that I began self-translating it into English. The self-translation had gone into many drafts over the years, and the original Chinese manuscript had also been submitted to magazines or journals in the Chinese-speaking world.
7. It was not till 2016 that it was published in China, as the following details show,
One novella, ‘Dao’ (Island)［岛］, published in The Triangular Mainsail ([Sanjiao Fan] Chinese title:《三角帆》), winter 2016, pp. 59-85.
8. Thanks to Barry’s kindness, its self-translated version was included in the final publication so that, in a way, this collection could be said to be a semi-self-translated fictional counterpart of Self Translation of poetry except that the two short stories were written in Australia.
9. These three self-translations remind me of Samuel Beckett’s three novels, Molloy, Malone and The Unnameable as they were first written in French and were later self-translated by him into English.
10. There’s a number of short stories published in Australia and elsewhere, such as Canada and Singapore; they are ‘She’ll be right’ (Canada), ‘A Christmas Gift’ (Singapore), ‘The Red Packets’ (Australia) and ‘The Australian Way’ (Westerly, No. 53, 2008, pp. 157-160).
Oops, the last one seems to have somehow gone missing in this collection. Perhaps an oversight on my part that I shall make up for in my next collection if ever there is a chance.
Buy the book here.
In Their Own Write 