Born in Goa to a Serbian mother and German father, Mary-Jane Newton spent the first years of her life in India. She subsequently grew up in Germany and England, and now grows up in Hong Kong. With a background in linguistics, communication and cultural studies, it is her aim, always, to meet her reader elsewhere, other than where words command us: beyond and beneath their meanings. Mary-Jane is married and works as an editor. Much of the variety in her first poetry collection, Of Symbols Misused, is touched by man's existential dilemma as a self-conscious being obliged to live his sunniest moments in the shadow of death and construct meaning in the maw of absurdity. Engaging with this dilemma, Newton shows an exultance with words and a commitment to exploring the elucidations and complications engendered by words as the primary tools of man's sometimes puny, sometimes magnificent, efforts to tell a story about himself.