Brian Castro

Castro was born in Hong Kong and has lived in Australia since 1961. Currently he is Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide and Director of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice. His publisher is Giramondo Publishing.

Born in Hong Kong of Portuguese, Chinese and English parentage, Brian Castro was educated at the University of Sydney, after which he worked in Australia, France and Hong Kong as a teacher and writer. His first novel Birds Of Passage (1983) won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award. Double-Wolf (1991) won The Age Fiction Prize, the Vance Palmer Prize and the Innovative Writing Prize at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. After China (1992) again won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. His sixth novel, Stepper (1997), was awarded the National Book Council Prize for Fiction. Shanghai Dancing was published by Giramondo in March 2003, winning the Victorian Premier’s Award, the NSW Premier’s Award and was named NSW Book of the Year. The Garden Book won the 2006 Queensland Premier’s Award and The Bath Fugues was short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award, the South Australian Premier’s Literary Award, the Queensland Premier’s Fiction Prize and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. In 2012 he published Street To Street, inspired by the life of the poet Christopher Brennan (Giramondo). His latest novel is Blindness and Rage (Giramondo, 2017.) He currently lives in the Adelaide Hills.

In 2014 he won the Patrick White Award for Literature for his contribution to Australian Literature.[5]