Over the Years

GILLIAN BICKLEY Dr Gillian Bickley (née Workman) was born and educated in the United Kingdom. She has held full-time academic positions teaching Literature in English at the University of Lagos (Nigeria), the University of Hong Kong, the University of Auckland (New Zealand) and retired as Associate Professor from the Department of English Language and Literature at Hong Kong Baptist University after twenty-two years of service there. She has lived and worked in Hong Kong since 1970 except for three years when living and teaching in New Zealand.

She is the biographer of the founder of Hong Kong Government Education, Dr Frederick Stewart, first principal of what is now known as Queen’s College, and of the first bishop of Victoria, Dr George Smith.

Her poetry collections are: For the Record (2003), Moving House (2005), Sightings (2007), China Suite (2009) and Perceptions (2012). The first two of these collections have been translated and published in Chinese; individual poems have been translated into several languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Czech and Turkish and anthologised in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Romania and the United Kingdom. In July 2014, at the 18th International Festival, “Curtea de Argeș Poetry Nights”, held in Romania, she was awarded the “Grand Prix Orient-Occident Des Arts” by the Festival Board. In 2016, a selection from her published poems was published in Romania in a bilingual English/Romanian edition, “Poems / Poeme”, by Editura Academiei Internaționale Orient-Occident. In 2017, a similar selection from her collected published poems was translated into Italian by Luisa Ternau, as Avvistamenti, pensieri, e sentimenti.  Gillian Bickley is one of the Hong Kong poets discussed in Agnes S. L. Lam’s study, Becoming poets: The Asian English Experience.

From time to time she teaches creative writing at the School of Professional and Continuing Education, University of Hong Kong.