Wong receives Burr/Tatham Trust Award

Alison Wong is the recipient of the NZ$35,000 Burr/Tatham Trust Award, which is one of eight 2024 Laureate Awards presented by the Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi to ‘celebrate and empower New Zealand’s most outstanding practising artists’.

Born in Te Matau-a-Māui Hawke’s Bay and of Cantonese descent, Wong is a novelist, poet, creative nonfiction writer and editor whose works weave together themes of identity, migration, and cultural heritage. Her historical novel As the Earth Turns Silver (Penguin NZ) won the 2010 New Zealand Post Book Award for Fiction. Wong co-edited the anthology A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand in 2021 and is currently working on the memoir Journeys Home: A Memoir of Aotearoa, Australia, and China.

The judging panel said: ‘Alison is a lone star in the literature of Aotearoa New Zealand, lighting the way for other writers. Her writing speaks to the complex richness of our social history and diasporic experiences. As the Earth Turns Silver remains the only novel by an Asian New Zealand writer to win our national book award for fiction, a bestseller translated into multiple languages that has influenced the way we understand and read our own country. Imaginative, wise and accomplished, she’s also the most generous of mentors and most thoughtful of editors.’

Category: Local news