Ely Finch (a.k.a. 林雍坣) hails from a sheep farm in western Victoria, and lives today in Melbourne with his wife Vivian Chan, who is a native Cantonese speaker from British Hong Kong. Ely has an interest in Chinese languages and traditional Chinese literature, and works as a linguist and consultant translator specialising in historical texts written in Literary (Classical) Chinese, Cantonese, and other southern Chinese languages. To date, his main focus has been texts that pertain to the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Chinese diaspora in Australia, with respect to which he has undertaken commissions from universities, museums, historians, archaeologists, family-history researchers, historical societies, doctoral students and others. His largest translation is Australia’s and possibly the West’s first Chinese-language novel, Wong Shee Ping’s The Poison of Polygamy: A Social Novel.
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