About Mei-Ling

Mei-Ling was born in the UK where she experienced an eccentric post-war Cambridge upbringing in an academic household. Elsewhere in the country little girls gave tea parties for their nicely-dressed dollies. Mei-Ling’s dolls wore any old thing and gave sherry parties where they discussed the two-cultures debate set off by the literary critic FR Levis, whose excoriating lecture in response to the novelist CP Snow brought about a huge furore at the time.

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With frequently travelling parents, some years saw her spending months at a time on a farm in a small village called Ellsworth, or travelling overseas with her mother. Later, she learned the art of letter writing at a quirky Quaker boarding school in Somerset. Mandatory Sunday morning letter writing awoke in her a love of writing. This increased with a bribe from her much loved, much older, brother—that if she wrote over a certain amount of news, he would double the number of pages in reply—and enclose chocolate. This was also possibly the beginning of her love affair with good quality dark chocolate.

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A spell in Jamaica, where maternal family roots lay, followed. The shock of a final year in a girls-only school was ameliorated by learning to SCUBA dive and finally finishing school. Returning to the UK, she read philosophy in what was possibly the tiniest department at Birmingham University staffed by unusual, colourful, characters. There, she met and married her husband, Bob. A post graduate teaching diploma was followed by many years of teaching.

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Mei-Ling and Bob moved to Australia in 2005. She has written many short stories, some of which have won competitions and many of which have been published in magazines.

She has also written two plays which have won places and been performed in festivals: