Shirley Geok-lin Lim


Shirley Geok-lin Lim was born in Malacca Malaysia. She is an American writer of poetry, fiction, and criticism. Her first collection of poems, Crossing The Peninsula, published in 1980, won her the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, a first both for an Asian and for a woman. Among several other awards that she has received, her memoir, Among the White Moon Faces, received the 1997 American Book Award.

Biography

Her first poem was published in the Malacca Times when she was ten. By the age of eleven, she knew that she wanted to be a poet.
Lim had her early education at Infant Jesus Convent under the then British colonial education system. She won a federal scholarship to the University of Malaya, where she earned a B.A. first class honours degree in English. In 1969, at the age of twenty-four, she entered graduate school at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts under a Fulbright scholarship, and received a PhD in English and American Literature in 1973.
Lim is married to Charles Bazerman, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Education at University of California, Santa Barbara.

Career

Lim is a professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has also taught internationally at the National University of Singapore, the National Institute Education of Nanyang Technological University, and was the Chair Professor at the University of Hong Kong where she also taught poetry and creative writing. She has authored several books of poems, short stories, and criticism, and serves as editor and co-editor of numerous scholarly works. Lim is a cross-genre writer, although she identifies herself as a poet. Her research interests include:
Lim has received numerous literary awards, among which are:
An extract from "The Town Where Time Stands Still" by Shirley Geok-lin Lim has been included in the Journeys Stimulus Booklet as part of the compulsory HSC English course, studied by all students in their final year of secondary schooling in New South Wales, Australia.

Books and articles