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Brian Castro Australia    PWF 1999

Brian Castro was born in Hong Kong in 1950 and moved to Australia in 1961. He attended the University of Sydney, graduating with a B.A. in 1972 and his M.A. in 1976. He has worked in Australia, France and Hong Kong as teacher and writer, and he was literary reviewer for Asiaweek magazine.

His novels have won a number of major literary awards, starting with his first, Birds of Passage (1983), a "powerful and haunting story of an Australian Chinese on collision course with the past" that won the Australian/Vogel literary award. A master of shifts in time, place and genre, his novels move between settings as diverse as Vienna, Hong Kong, Tokyo, New South Wales or the deck of a whaling ship, subverting a variety of literary genres in the process.

He has since written several more novels, including After China (1993), Drift (1995), Stepper (1997), a tale of erotic love and espionage set in 1930s Japan. In 2003, he published his fictional autobiography, Shanghai Dancing, which won the Vance Palmer Prize at the 2003 Victorian Premier’s Awards. His most recent book, published in 2005, was The Garden Book.

Brian Castro now divides his time between Adelaide and Melbourne.