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PERCEPTIONS consists of short pieces, poetry or poem-like essays, written over a period of thirty years, on various serious and reflective topics, but with some humorous and occasional work too. As in Gillian Bickley's previous collections, the subjects occur internationally: this time, in the Pyrenees, Nigeria, Hawai'i, Albania, as well as Hong Kong. Taken as a whole, this fifth poetry collection recognizes the need for shelter and survival, the desire for love, for achievement, for feelings of self-worth, for objects on which to bestow reciprocal affection and the search for high-order achievements beyond the self. Reaching beyond this, Perceptions considers the needs of other species, our responsibilities towards them and the fragile environment that we all share.
Gillian Bickley
GILLIAN BICKLEY was born and educated in the United Kingdom and has lived mainly in Hong Kong (but also in Nigeria, West Africa, and Auckland, New Zealand) during her professional career as a University teacher of Literature in English. Six of her poetry collections have been published: For the Record (2003), Moving House (2005), Sightings (2007), China Suite (2009), Perceptions (2012), and Grandfather’s Robin (2022), and her collected selected poems, Over the Years (2017). Two have been translated and published in Chinese. Individual poems havd been anthologised in Hong Kong, the Philippines and the United Kingdom & translated into several languages. In 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. 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 now teaches creative writing at the School of Professional and Continuing Education, University of Hong Kong.
Gillian is also known as a historian who takes special interest in nineteenth century Hong Kong. Her biography of the founder of Hong Kong Government Education, The Golden Needle: the Biography of Frederick Stewart (1836-1889) (1997), is regarded as definitive. Other works arising from the research relating to The Golden Needle are: The Stewarts of Bourtreebush (2003), the following editions: The Complete Court Cases of Magistrate Frederick Stewart (2008), A Magistrate's Court in Nineteenth Century Hong Kong: Court in Time (2005; 2nd edition, 2009), and The Development of Education in Hong Kong, 1841-1897 (2002).
More recently, her editions, Through American Eyes: The Journals (18 May 1859 - 1 September 1860) Of George Washington (Farley) Heard (1837-1875) (2017) and Journeys with a Mission: Travel Journals of The Right Revd George Smith (1815-1871), first Bishop of Victoria, Hong Kong (1849-1865) (2018) joined an earlier work, Hong Kong Invaded! A ’97 Nightmare (University of Hong Kong Press, 2001) (an edition of the 1897 work of future war fiction, The Back Door), and have gained attention. With her husband, Verner Bickley, she founded the International Proverse Prize for unpublished book-length fiction, non-fiction, or poetry and the International Proverse Poetry Prize for single poems.
