About
Kit Fan was born and educated in Hong Kong when the city was the last British colony, before moving to the UK at 21. He is a poet, novelist, and book critic. He lives in York.
He was shortlisted for The Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize for 'Duty Free' in 2017 and for 'City of Culture' in 2018. He was also shortlisted for the 2017 TLS Mick Imlah Poetry Prize.
His debut novel Diamond Hill will be published in May 2021 by Dialogue Books/Little, Brown and by World Editions. In 2018, he won a Northern Writers' Award to support the writing of the novel.
His first book of poems Paper Scissors Stone (Hong Kong University Press, 2011) won the inaugural International HKU Poetry Prize.
His second book of poems As Slow As Possible (Arc) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, one of The Guardian's 50 biggest books in Autumn 2018, and The Irish Times Best Poetry Book of the Year.
He was awarded by the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon to be a Visiting Scholar in 2020-21.
He was awarded the Editors Prize for Reviewing by the Poetry magazine and Poetry Foundation in the US.
He is represented by the literary agent Matt Turner at Rogers, Coleridge & White.
Debut Novel
Diamond Hill
Kit Fan's debut novel Diamond Hill will be published by Dialogue Books/Little, Brown and World Editions in May 2021.
Set in the last shanty town of Hong Kong before the fraught 1997 handover from Britain to China, Diamond Hill follows the return of a recovering heroin addict, Buddha, as he tries to salvage what's left from a place he hoped to forget.
Diamond Hill was once the 'Hollywood of the Orient', but is now an eyesore in the middle of a glitzy financial hub. Buddhist nuns, drug gangs, property developers, the government and foreign powers are all vying for power, each wanting to stake their claim on the land.
Buddha finds himself crossing swords with the Iron Nun, fighting for her nunnery; a disturbed novice, Quartz, who is fleeing her past; a faded film actress called Audrey Hepburn; and Boss, a teenage gang leader with a big mouth and even bigger plans, plotting to escape what she calls 'the death of Hong Kong'.
Kit Fan's hard-hitting and exhilarating debut is a requiem for a disappearing city, and a meditation on powerlessness, religion, colonialism and displacement. It explores the price of forgetting and how the present is ultimately always entangled in the past.Books
‘Utterly straightforward and lucid, with an oblique dream-like undertow, Fan’s remarkable poems – that seem wholly original, even in their echoes of the various traditions that inform them – intrigue us with their haunting and haunted observations and atmospheres. The assurance of the voice in As Slow As Possible is often startling, partly because of the precision of its vulnerability, and partly because Fan seems to sense something in the language that gives his poems an uncanny momentum and coherence. There is wisdom encoded in these poems that is at once fleeting and revelatory. It is an extraordinary book.’
Adam Phillips
‘If there is something of Marianne Moore’s eccentric edginess in the formal accomplishment of these poems, there is also an elegant surrealism wholly Kit Fan’s own. His is an intensely visual imagination, generous and capacious of eye, but joining its manifold optical stimuli to a corresponding tenderness and complexity of emotional response. ‘How should we unimagine a thing once it’s been imagined?’ asks one poem, and the collection as a whole concerns itself with reversals, metaphysical shifts in gear permitting us a glimpse of origins, of possibilities as yet untouched by the immutable laws of cause and effect. Fan’s is in this sense a recuperative vision, at the same time too fiercely intelligent to be anything other than disabused. The resulting poems hum with intellectual tension like high-voltage wires. As Slow as Possible deserves to be read in the way its title suggests: this is a collection that will lavishly reward careful and attentive reading.’
Caitríona O’Reilly
Reviews of As Slow As Possible:
- Richie McCaffery, The Poetry School
- Claire Crowther, The Poetry Review
- Rory Waterman, The Times Literary Supplement
- Jen Campbell, YouTube review for The Poetry Book Society
- Antony Huen, Hong Kong Review of Books
Winner of the inaugural Hong Kong University International Poetry Prize
“‘Then all things began twice.’ The poems in Paper Scissors Stone are moved by the forces of repetition and release, and are haunted by crossings (of borders, of people, of languages and their written characters). With wit and sorrow, precision and tact, the poems study the essential qualities of places, persons, and their arrangements, asking us what it is to begin twice. The book is a formally beautiful and complete meditation on transformation.”
Saskia Hamilton
“These extraordinary poems, so assured in their directions, so startling in their clarities, have an eerily dream-like wakefulness. Fan’s enigmatic lucidity is born of a confluence of traditions, both real and imagined. This is not simply a remarkable debut, but a brilliantly accomplished book.”
Adam Phillips
“Here is a collection of complex work, skillfully executed. The poems, each carefully measured and crafted, when taken together add up to a beautifully articulated body of work. This is the performance of a fully fledged poet.”
Louise Ho
Short Stories
Shortlisted for the Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize 2017
Sheila, an immigrant divorcee and mother, works as a cleaner while her son Sunny receives private tutoring in the Hong Kong International Airport where a strange incident has taken place and thrown the mother and son into actions that they have never dreamed before.
Shortlisted for the Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize 2018
Mai, a teenage girl from a seaside northern city, lives with her absent mother and works in her grandmother's Chinese takeaway after school. In a wake of a family crisis, she struggles to find her voice while participating in her school debate on the EU Referendum.
Media and Interviews
Kit Fan talks with Alice Oswald about her latest book, Nobody (Cape Poetry, UK and W.W. Norton, US).
Parts of Kit's poem 'Genesis', a collage of Chinese creation myths recast in the form of the King James's Authorised Bible, was set into music by the Hong Kong composer Adrian Lam. It was performed at the Fringe Club on 5th November 2019 as part of the HK International Literary Festival.
Kit was interviewed by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho and Jason Eng Hun Lee back in 2018 as part of a project 'Anglophone City Poetics and the Asian Experience'. Kit 'talks about his first poetic influences, his migration to the UK as a young writer, his musings on Hong Kong and afar, and his perspectives on the evolving Asian cityscape.'
Kit discussed the idea of poetry in the north with Andrew McMillan, Rachael Allen, and Zaffar Kunial.
British Library Sounds
A recording of Kit's poems from his first book of poems Paper Scissors Stone including some Classical Chinese poems in English translations.
Chinese University of Hong Kong Digital Archive
Kit Fan "grew up in the shadows of the Sino-British negotiations distills the angst of his age. Upheavals, reaching back to the Japanese occupation, and forward to the handover in 1997 and beyond, imprint on his poetry. And yet a greater strength inheres, for the continuity of tradition, the persistence of the Chinese poetic thought in a poetry rendered in English, makes his writing rich with resonances that cross language borders." - Mimi Ching, Curator of 'A Grain of Sand'
The Whitworth Gallery, Manchester
Kit Fan read with Colette Bryce and Martin Kratz on 19th February 2019. He read a selection of poems from As Slow As Possible including 'Janus', 'Chapter 2' of GENESIS, 'As Slow As Possible', and 'My Mother in a Velázquez'.
Cork, Ireland
Kit Fan read with Colette Bryce and Lucy English on 24th November 2018. He read a selection of poems, including 'A Chair from Buddha Mountain' from As Slow As Possible.
