Lynda Chanwai-Earle

Lynda Chanwai-Earle is a New Zealand writer and radio producer. Her written work includes plays, poems and film scripts. The play Ka Shue – Letters Home in 1996 is semi-autobiographical and is significant in New Zealand literature as the first authentically New Zealand–Chinese play for mainstream audiences.

Background The daughter of a Chinese mother and a Pākehā father, she was born in London and spent her early years in Papua New Guinea, completing her schooling in New Zealand. She studied fine arts at the Elam School of Fine Arts, drama at the University of Auckland and script writing at Victoria University of Wellington.

Career Lynda Chanwai-Earle's poetry has appeared in literary journals in New Zealand and elsewhere including Landfall, Hecate and Antic. Her poems are included in the anthologies Sevensome (1993) and Going Solo (1997).

Chanwai-Earle represented New Zealand at the inaugural Hong Kong Literary Festival in 2001 and was the NZ Poet Delegate attending the 2002 Asia-Pacific Conference on Indigenous and Contemporary Poetry in Manila, Philippines. In 2003 she was the Trans-Tasman writer at the 2003 Queensland Poetry Festival, she also attended the Shanghai Literary Festival in 2005. In 2015 at Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou Chanwai-Earle was the inaugural NZ writer in resident. In 2019 Chanwai Earle was the writer in residence at Victoria University of Wellington, working on a film adaptation of her play Man in a Suitcase, based on the real-life murder of a Chinese student in Auckland.

Chanwai-Earle has been short-listed several times for the Bruce Mason Playwriting Award. In 1996 when she premiered her one-woman show Ka-Shue (Letters Home) in 1996 there was no other reflection of modern Asian-Kiwi identity in professional theatre. In an interview for a journal Chanwai-Earle recalls some audience feedback, "I saw your play in Christchurch and it changed my life and my sister’s. We are both Eurasian and we never had anything to do with our Paw Paw, she spoke Cantonese and we could not understand her. But I saw your play and I was really moved and we really made an effort to speak to her". She was involved with two theatrical projects created in prisons, A Christmas Wish at Arohata Women's Prison (1997), and Kia Maumahara at Christchurch Women's Prison and the Christchurch Arts Festival (1997). Heat is about a love triangle between a woman, a man and a penguin. Brian Hotter, the actor who played the penguin won Best Actor at Chapman Trip Theatre Awards in 2008. There are two other two scripts in the pipeline to complete the Antarctic Trilogy which began with HEAT.

From May 2011 to July 2018 Chanwai-Earle worked as a producer and presenter for Radio New Zealand including on the documentary podcast series Voices which features people from diverse global backgrounds living in New Zealand.

Film

Chinese Whispers (1996). Co-wrote with Neil Pardington and Stuart McKenzie. Art director. Short film. Produced by MAP Productions. After (2003). Co-directed with Simon Raby. Short film.

Multimedia

Spawn – Spurn, Red Zephyr Festival, B-Side, Auckland University, 1991–1992 Dementia Praecox, Wellington and Auckland City Galleries 1993 Standard Deviation, Artspace, Auckland, 1993 Yum Char, Herald, 1996 Letters, New China — a New Zealand Exhibition, NZ Festival of the Arts, 1996.