Evelyn Lau

Lau lives in Vancouver, where she is a manuscript consultant in Simon Fraser University's Writing and Publishing Program. On Oct. 14, 2011, Lau was named the poet laureate for the city of Vancouver. She is the third poet to hold this honorary position; her plan is to offer ‘poet-in-residence consultations with aspiring poets’.

Lau had a well-publicized romantic relationship with W. P. Kinsella, a University of Victoria creative writing professor and poet more than 30 years her senior. After she published a personal essay in 1997 about the relationship, Kinsella sued her for libel. ("Me and W.P." won a Western Magazine Award for Human Experience, and was shortlisted for the Gold Award for Best Article).

Her work in magazines has won four Western Magazine Awards and a National Magazine Award; she also received the Air Canada Award, the Vantage Women of Originality Award, the ACWW Community Builders Award, and the Mayor's Arts Award for Literary Arts. Her poems were selected for inclusion in Best American Poetry (1992) and Best Canadian Poetry (2009, 2010, 2011, 2016). Lau has also worked as writer-in-residence at the University of British Columbia, Kwantlen University, and Vancouver Community College, and was Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Calgary.

Despite the chaos of her first two years' independence, she submitted numerous poems to journals and received some recognition. A diary she kept at the time was published in 1989 as Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid. The book was a critical and commercial success; Lau received praise for frankly chronicling her relationships with manipulative older men, the life and habits of a group of anarchists with whom she stayed immediately after leaving home, her experiences with a couple from Boston who smuggled her into the United States, her abuse of various drugs, and her relationship with British Columbia's child support services. The diary was adapted as a film The Diary of Evelyn Lau (1993), starring Canadian actress Sandra Oh.

Evelyn Lau began publishing poetry at the age of 12; her creative efforts helped her escape the pressure of home and school. In March 1986, at age 14, Lau left home and spent the next several years living itinerantly in Vancouver as a homeless person, sleeping mainly in shelters, friends' homes, and on the street. She also became involved in prostitution and drug abuse during this time.

Evelyn Lau was born in Vancouver, British Columbia on July 2, 1971 to Chinese-Canadian parents from Hong Kong, who intended for her to become a doctor. Her parents' ambitions for her were wholly irreconcilable with her own; consequently, her home and school lives were desperately unhappy. Lau attended Templeton Secondary School in Vancouver. In 1986 Lau ran away from her unbearable existence as a social outcast and pariah in school and a tyrannized daughter at home.