Brian Castro

Brian Albert Castro (born 1950) is an Australian novelist and essayist.

Castro was born at sea, between Macau and Hong Kong, in 1950.

His father was of Spanish, Portuguese, and English descent, and born in Shanghai.

His mother was the daughter of a Chinese farmer and an English missionary.

His first language was Cantonese Chinese, but his maternal grandmother taught him English, and he also learnt Macanese Portuguese (spoken in Macao) and French.

He moved to Australia in 1961, first attending a boarding school in Sydney, at St Joseph's College, Hunters Hill and the University of Sydney, after which he worked in Australia, France and Hong Kong as a teacher and writer.

His first novel, Birds of Passage (1983), won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award.

Double-Wolf (1991) won The Age Fiction Prize, the Vance Palmer Prize and the Innovative Writing Prize at the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards.

After China (1992) again won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award.

His sixth novel, Stepper (1997), was awarded the National Book Council Prize (Banjo Award) for Fiction.

Shanghai Dancing was published by Giramondo in March 2003, winning the Victorian Premier's Literary Award and the NSW Premier's Award, and was named NSW Book of the Year.

The Garden Book won the 2006 Queensland Premier's Literary Award, and The Bath Fugues was short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award, the South Australian Premier's Award, the Queensland Premier's Fiction Prize and the Victorian Premier's Literary Award.

He was Chair of Creative Writing (2008–2019) at the University of Adelaide and director of the J. M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice there.

In 2012 he published Street To Street, inspired by the life of the poet Christopher Brennan (Giramondo).

In 2014 he won the Patrick White Award for Literature for his contribution to Australian Literature.

Blindness and Rage won the Prime Minister's Award for Poetry in 2018.