Kit Fan is a poet, novelist and critic. He was born and educated in Hong Kong before moving to the UK at 21. His debut novel is Diamond Hill (2021). His first book of poems, Paper Scissors Stone (2011), won the inaugural HKU International Poetry Prize. As Slow As Possible (2018) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and one of the Irish Times Books of the Year. His third poetry collection The Ink Cloud Reader (2023) is shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection.
Twice shortlisted for the Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize and the TLS Mick Imlah Poetry Prize, he has won Northern Writers Awards for Fiction and Poetry, the Times Stephen Spender Poetry Translation Prize, and POETRY Editors’ Prize for Reviewing. In 2023, he was shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship and the Moth Poetry Prize judged by the Nobel Laureate Louise Glück.
He was a Visiting Scholar at the The Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon in 2023.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.
He was appointed a Non-Executive Director of the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) in 2023.
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'A moving, lyrically potent collection charting the interconnected impacts of political and personal fracture...This is a book of pin-sharp, dazzlingly original images...creating a painfully raw yet deeply affecting poetic universe.' The Guardian
'Kit Fan as technician is a poet of courage. He experiments with various structures in The Ink Cloud Reader, neither afraid to break rules nor to keep in touch with tradition.' The Guardian, Carol Rumen's Poem of the Week
'A bold and mature collection...that offers something new with each turn of the page... Lucidly and elegantly, Fan uses metaphors of reading and writing to explore some of the most elemental themes of the human condition: love, loss, politics, place, and literature itself... Fan’s attention to the physical properties of ink and the book is reflected in his virtuosity in form; no two poems look the same.' Asian Review of Books
'A marvel of language and form. It looks towards the past and the future, excavating both memory and a crystallised loss that is not yet realised... The use of form in this collection is magnificent - each poem varies with imaginative and visual delight. The Ink Cloud Reader bleeds brilliance through every page.' Poetry London
'What makes Fan's collection so compelling [is] the way in which his habitual posture keeps being interrogated.... Even as he deconstructs it, Fan remains committed to lyric's status as a threshold space in which sufferings can be recollected, endured and compared.' The Poetry Review
'From an unnamed illness to referencing Hong Kong’s decade of protest and crackdown to depictions of queer sexuality, [Fan] transforms everyday loss and violence into something sublime.' The Straits Times
'The "ink cloud" that lends the book its title is not a cloud of ink, but rather a reflection of the clouds in ink... Fan's collection fulfils an elegiac function for a disappearing Hong Kong... It stands both as part of and separate from the works of other writers affiliated with Hong Kong in the UK. To Fan, poetry arrives aware of its many limitations, of its inability to capture the totality of the world's beauty and suffering. Fan's collection stands as a testament to the necessity of resisting such futility.' Quarterly Literary Review Singapore
'The Ink Cloud Reader [delves] into vocational anxiety, collective wounds, supportive love, and the cycle of mortality in his usually poignant expressions and a more versatile range of forms. The unified, life-affirming collection often delivers the soothing experience of an insightful, witty, and understanding mind'. Cha
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In his disquieting third collection The Ink Cloud Reader, Kit Fan takes enormous risks linguistically, formally and visually to process the news of a sudden illness and the threat of mortality, set against the larger chaos of his beloved city Hong Kong and our broken planet. These shape-shifting poems are persistently sensitive to anxiety, and to beauty, questioning the turbulent climate of our time while celebrating the power of ink – of reading and writing.
'In The Ink Cloud Reader, Kit Fan's moving, wise and fluid poems grapple with the forces "converting loss to some form / of chaos". The book's vivid portrait of a marriage, quickened by sickness and the threat of separation, presents love as a play of shadow and light. Fan gets stranger, more daring, with each successive book: he is an essential poet, and one I will always return to.' Sarah Howe
'The compressed narratives in The Ink Cloud Reader demonstrate both lyric intensity and a remarkable dramatic reach. In this impressive third collection, Kit Fan's restless, explorative, compositional impulse is evident from first to last [...] The poems in this collection - personal, political, edgy, sometimes provocative - have a unifying voice both intriguing and wholly original.' David Harsent
'Kit Fan's poems are a kind of lyric vortex: imagistic fictions that wrap themselves around a hard, lyrical, personal centre, something like the complexity of a seed. This collection holds at its core the tension of what to say and how to say it, gloriously in celebration of ambivalence, and questioning.' Rachael Allen
Watch Kit Fan talks about the book as part of the T.S. Eliot Prize
Watch Kit Fan read 'From the Yemen Data Project'
Watch Kit Fan read '2047: A Hong Kong Space Odyssey'
Read Kit Fan's Interview with the Forward Prize about The Ink Cloud Reader
Winner of the inaugural Hong Kong University International Poetry Prize
'Do you know what it was like here? You wouldn't believe the glamour. We had our own film studio, redbrick houses for the stars, even Jackie Chan. Now look at us - the Hollywood of the Orient will soon be gone altogether.'
Criticism
Feature pieces:
Reviews:
Media and Interviews
Interviews:
Readings and Podcasts:
Professional engagements:
Events
Forthcoming events
14 Januaray 2024: T.S. Eliot Prize Reading, Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London
Past events
8 June 2018 Reading at Fugitive Ideas: A Cerebration for Hugh Haughton, the University of York
10 July 2018 Short story, 'City of Culture' long-listed in the Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize
6 August 2018 Short story, 'City of Culture' shortlisted in the Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize
27 July 2018 Poetry Book Society News Blog on my second book As Slow As Possible
12 September 2018 Prize ceremony of the 2018 Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize, London
11 October 2018 Launch of As Slow As Possible organised by the Poetry Book Society and University of York, with Kate Potts and Zaffar Kunial
23-24 November 2018 Reading at Ó Bhéal (Winter Warmer Festival), Cork, Ireland
13 December 2018 Northern Poetry Showcase and Roadshow, York St John University
19 January 2019 Poets and Players Reading with Colette Bryce and Martin Kratz, with music from the Kell Wind Trio, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester
21 January 2019 In conversation with Adam Phillips, Lutyens & Rubinstein Bookshop, London
29 March 2019 Wretched Strangers: Poetry & Migration, part of York Literature Festival
27-30 May 2019 Unamuno Literary Festival, Madrid
27-29 September 2019 Kings Lynn Poetry Festival, Kings Lynn Town Hall
30 October 2019 Reading at the University of Sheffield with John Birtwhistle and Peter Hughes
3-10 November 2019 Reading and Workshops in the Hong Kong Literature Festival
23 November 2019 Interview by New Writing North on the debut novel Diamond Hill, University of Bradford
19 September 2020 The Hong Kong Shuffle: a celebration of Hong Kong poetics
18 October 2020 Durham Literary Festival, Dialogue Books Proof Party: Kit Fan and Buki Papilllon
21 October 2020 Madrid Bookie: The Art of Self-Care - A Hygge Evening of Readings
3 December 2020 From Irish Fever to Chinese Flu - The Racialisation of Epidemics: Reading with Ian Duhig and Anna Chen
18 January 2021 Brixton Book Jam with Stella Duffy, Nikita Gill, Salena Golden, Kit Fan & Courttia Newland via Zoom, Facebook & YouTube
16 February 2021 Poetry Reading: Launch of the Chinese Language poetry collection at Manchester Poetry Library, with Jennifer Lee Tsai and Natalie Linh Bolderston
20 February 2021 Poetry Reading: Launch event of Hong Kong-Singapore Digital Travel Bubble
6 March 2021 Poetry Reading: Asian Cha and What We Read Now with Annie Fan, Louise Leung, and Eddie Tay
30 March 2021 Madrid Bookie event with Spencer Reece
7 May 2021 Toronto Public Library: Launch of Diamond Hill
10 May 2021 Times Radio interview with Mariella Frostrup
10 May 2021 University of Liverpool: Launch of Diamond Hill with Xin Ran
13 May 2021 Dialogue Book Launch of Diamond Hill with Fane Productions
20 May 2021 University of York: Launch of Diamond Hill
22 May 2021 Singapore: Instagram launch of Diamond Hill with Elaine Chiew
9 June 2021 Reflecting/ed Modernity: Roundtable Discussion
1 October 2021, Wasafiri Poetry Reading
8-9 October 2021, San Francisco Litquake
13 November 2021, Hong Kong International Literary Festival
3 June 2022, Reading and conversations with Alice Oswald, Keble College, Oxford
22 October 2022, Poets & Players, The International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester
24 October 2022, 100 Queer Poems, University of York
22 November 2022, NWN x University of York: Pride of Place
23 November 2022, New Writing North Book Club, Diamond Hill
19 April 2023, 7pm-8pm: Carcanet Online Book Launch of The Ink Cloud Reader with Caitríona O'Reilly
11 May 2023, 5:00-6:30pm: Reading of The Ink cloud Reader, The Leeds Library
13 May 2023, Workshop: The First Ten Pages, Newcastle Writing Conference
9 June 2023, 6:30-7:30pm: Inspired by Libraries: Kit Fan in Conversation with Andrew McMillan, Manchester Poetry Library
10 June 2023, 2-4pm: Where Else: An International Hong Kong Anthology Reading, University of Leeds
15 October 2023: Workshop: The First Ten Pages with Kit Fan, Durham Book Festival
15 October 2023: Poetry Book Society Showcase: Mary Jean Chan, Kit Fan and Jen Campbell
16 October 2023: Forward Poetry Prize Reading and Ceremony, Leeds Playhouse
20 October 2023: Reading with Monica Youn, Kit Fan & Will Harris at Bush House, Kings College London
13 November 2023: Reading with Tristram Fane Saunders at University of York
© Kit Fan 2023