Lydia Kwa
BIOGRAPHY
Lydia Kwa was born in Singapore and has been living in Canada since 1980. She attended the University of Toronto to do a Bachelor’s of Science in Psychology, later spending seven years at Queen's University in Kingston getting her MA and PhD. At Queen’s, she started dropping in to a writers’ group. In 1989, poems that she submitted to two campus periodicals won prizes. Her poems were published in that same year in the Winnipeg-based literary magazine CV2.
She spent a couple of years after graduation working in Calgary, first at the University of Calgary Counselling Service, then at the Calgary Women’s Health Collective. She moved to Vancouver in the summer of 1992 and started out working full-time as a psychologist in an organisation. In 1994 her first poetry collection The Colours of Heroines was published by Women’s Press. At that time, she also began her private practice as a psychologist while working with various organisations over the years.
Kwa is now based in Vancouver and has published several books. Her first novel, This Place Called Absence, was published by Turnstone Press in 2000. This was followed by The Walking Boy (Key Porter Books, 2005), her second poetry collection sinuous (Turnstone Press, 2013), and her third novel Pulse (Ethos Books, 2014). Her recent novels include Oracle Bone (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2017), and The Walking Boy (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2019).
Author Photo: Ronny Hill Photography
Biography © Lydia Kwa. All rights reserved.
