Rose Lu

INFO

Name	Rose Lu (she/her)
Born	1990
Country of Birth	China
Place of Residence	Pōneke Wellington
Ethnicities	Chinese
Artform	Literature
Decades Active	2020s, 2010s

ABOUT

Rose Lu is a writer, software developer and rock climber living in Pōneke Wellington. Her work has been published in Sport, Starling and Turbine Kapohau, as well as in the anthology A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand. Her debut book, All Who Live on Islands, was published by Victoria University Press in 2019 to glowing reviews, and the collection has been adapted for radio by RNZ, read by Lu herself.

Lu moved to Aotearoa with her parents at the age of five, from Chongming, an island district of Shanghai. Settling in Whanganui, the family ran a dairy and takeaway shop, and Lu’s maternal grandparents lived with the family during her childhood. In 2008, Lu moved to Ōtautahi Christchurch to study mechatronics engineering. She graduated in 2011 and began working as a software developer the following year, eventually relocating to Pōneke in 2014.

Lu has said that she didn’t start writing until she was 26 after moving to Pōneke and meeting other writers. She studied for an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters, graduating in 2018. On applying to the course, Lu has said, “Putting together the writing portfolio was a frantic exercise. I had no body of work to draw from, as I had not studied creative writing, or even English literature.”

Her essay collection, All Who Live on Islands, was developed during this time and was awarded the Creative Nonfiction Prize at the Institute of Modern Letters. It features nine autobiographical essays that reflect on Lu’s experiences as a 1.5 generation Chinese New Zealander, particularly one who grew up in smaller towns such as Whanganui and Palmerston North.

Lu writes about growing up with her grandparents, her high school jobs, tramping and her early sexual experiences, as well as her experiences of racism and intergenerational tension. Reviewing the book, Brannavan Gnanalingam wrote that it “captures what it was like to grow up caught between worlds in almost painful detail. The book floats between China, Whanganui, Christchurch, Palmerston North, Auckland, and Wellington. It’s remarkably assured for a debut collection – each essay perfectly formed and capturing a sense not only of Lu’s own idiosyncrasies, but those of her family.” The essays incorporate Hanzi characters and pinyin throughout the English text, and Gnangalingam described a general sense that Lu refuses to “compromise in the writing for a presumed Pākehā audience.”

In 2022, Lu was selected as the Aotearoa writer-in-residence at Randell Cottage. There, she worked on a novel that features a second-generation Chinese New Zealander and a Taiwanese character who migrated to Aotearoa in her mid-twenties. Lu has said:

I want this book to be divorced from the expectation that POC are thinking about their race in relation to a Pākehā majority, by having the primary dialogue be between Chinese and Taiwanese characters. I also want to challenge mainstream notions of representation. We all have complicated relationships to home, family and language, and I want to write a story set across different times and generations to explore that.