SHIRLEY GEOK-LIN

LIM
BIOGRAPHY
Lim was born on 27 December 1944 in the historic town of Malacca,
on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula (in British Malaya), to a
Hokkein-Malayan father, Chin Som Lim and a Singaporean Chinese-
Peranakan mother, Chye Neo Ang Lim.
she grew up in a big family of ten children, of which she was the third
and the only girl of six children borne by her mother, who later left
the family when Lim was eight.
Her father remarried and the second wife, Lims stepmother, bore him
four more children.
CONT
She is an American writer of poetry, fiction, and criticism.
Her first collection of poems is entitled Crossing The Peninsula (published in 1980). The collection
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 American Book Award in 1997.
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.
She studied under federal scholarship at the University of Malaya, where she earned a B.A. first
class honors degree in English.
At age of twenty-four, she entered graduate school at Brandeis University in Walthalm,
Massachusetts under a Fulbright scholarship, and received a PhD in English and American
Literature in 1973.
Lim is married to Charles Bazerman, also a professor and chair of the Education Department at
University of California, Santa Barbara.
- Lims work reflects the ambivalent and complex imagination of a writer who is Malaysian-Chinese and
Asian-American at the same time.

- Lim is a professor in the English Department of the University of California in Santa Barbara.

- According to Lim, her works are:

ontological, [which] has to do with questions about the relation of an individual to the
exigencies of making sense of itself in the world, with or without others.

She further maintains that the thematic strains that fascinate her are

[the] social forces of race and ethnic divisiveness, colonialand gender tensions, [and] the crises
brought about by modern and intercultural politics.
 SOURCES
http://www.academia.edu/11868373/Shirley_Geok-
lin_Lim_A_Biographical_Essay

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Geok-lin_Lim