Ting J. Yiu has a diverse background spanning academia, environmental education, sustainability, and creative writing. She has extensive experience coordinating interdisciplinary science research and oversees the management and execution of complex projects such as UNRULY.
Ting is a writer, spearfisher, and freediver, working at the intersection of nature and diaspora, exploring aquatic narratives and interspecies/more-than-human encounters in her literature. Her hybrid childhood in post-colonial Hong Kong, adolescence in New Zealand’s settler-indigenous bi-cultural society, and adulthood in a Europe of increasingly contested ideas of citizenship, has generated a preoccupation with navigating liminal spaces in life and creative practice. Writing, diving, and wilderness are her anchors against the fragmentary experience of diaspora. A former marine conservation educator for the Mountains To Sea Conservation Trust (NZ), she spent much of her time teaching while submerged in oceans and rivers. She holds a MA in Transnational Creative Writing (Stockholm University); and BA's in English Literature and Human Geography (University of Otago).
Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry has been published in national anthologies and other esteemed literary journals, exploring the interface between place, time, identity, and borders (both artificial and natural). She is shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize (2025). Her works have appeared in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Hainamana: Asian New Zealand Arts and Culture, Two Thirds North, Orientaliska Studier, among others. Her writing was featured in New Zealand’s first Asian literary anthology A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand (Auckland University Press, 2021); her piece was selected for the book's nationwide tour. She is one of sixteen writers representing New Zealand’s literary canon (alongside Katherine Mansfield, Frank Sargeson, Patricia Grace, and Witi Ihimaera) in Lit: Stories From Home (OneTree House Publishing, 2021); the New Zealand School's Association incorporated the book into curriculum nationwide. She founded of The Writers' Collective, fostering a vibrant community of writers, providing mentorship and facilitating workshops to nurture creative talent. See her portfolio here
