Shirley Lim

Shirley Lim was born in Melaka, Malaysia into a life of poverty, deprivation, parental violence, and abandonment in a culture that, at that time, rarely recognized girls as individuals, Lim had a pretty unhappy childhood.

Lim had her early education at Infant Jesus Convent under the British Colonial education system. She won a federal scholarship to the University Of Malaya, where she earned 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 Fullbright scholarship, and received a P.H.D in English and American Literature in 1973.

Lim is married to Charles Bazerman who are also a professor and chair of the Education Department at University of California, Santa Barbara. Lim is a professor in English Department at the University Of California, Santa Barbara and has also taught internationally at the National University of Singapore, the National institute Education of Nanyang Technology 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.

Books of poetry and short stories

"Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems" (1980)
"Another Country" (1982)
"Life's Mysteries" (1985)
"No Man's Grove and Other Poems" (1985)
"Modern Secret: New and Selected Poems" (1989)
"Monsoon History" (1994)
"Two Dreams: New and Selected Stories" (1997)
"What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say" (1998)