Miriam Wei Wei Lo (b. 1973)
BIOGRAPHY
Miriam Wei Wei Lo was born in Canada to an Anglo-Australian mother and a Malaysian-Chinese father. She grew up in Singapore, where she was informally mentored in poetry by Angeline Yap (a neighbour), and went to school at Raffles (all the way, including in the GEP). She was chairperson of the RJC Creative Writing Club in 1991, taking over from Alvin Pang.
Miriam fell out of the sky at 19 and moved to Australia, the country of her citizenship, though not of her birth or formation.
She studied Arts at the University of Western Australia, and acquired a PhD in creative writing from the University of Queensland. The work she developed during her PhD, a poetic re-telling of the lives of her two grandmothers, was published by Five Islands Press in 2004 and won the 2004 Western Australian Premier’s Prize for poetry. Miriam then decamped to Margaret River in Western Australia where she spent 11 years raising her children, growing her own fruit and vegetables, and doing the unpaid work of a Baptist pastor’s wife. During this period, Miriam had poems included in Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia (2008, eds. Alvin Pang & John Kinsella), The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry (2009, ed. John Kinsella), Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (2013, eds. Boey Kim Cheng, Michelle Cahill, and Adam Aitken), The Turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry (2014, ed. John Kinsella), and The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry (2017, eds. Tracy Ryan and John Kinsella). No Pretty Words and Other Poems, a small collection, came out with Picaro Press in 2011. Her poem “Home”, was chosen for the NSW school syllabus towards the end of this period.
Miriam moved back to Boorloo / Perth in 2019, with her husband and family, to take up a part-time academic position at Sheridan Institute of Higher Education, where she taught creative writing till 2025. During this time, she co-edited two anthologies (Seagift 2022 and Seagift 2024). She was also on the judging panel for the Australian Christian Book of the Year in 2024 and 2025. Miriam was a 2023 Westerly Mid Career Fellow and her third collection, Who Comes Calling?, was published in 2023 by WA Poets Press.
Her current interests include Chinese diasporan women’s autograph albums from the World War Two era, and the ways in which poetry can be used to process trauma, particularly for those who live and work from a Christian faith perspective.
She is still figuring out how to pay the bills so she can keep writing poetry.
Author Photo and Biography © Miriam Wei Wei Lo. All rights reserved.
