About
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.
Poetry
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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
***
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
‘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. 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’ReillyReviews 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 HoDebut Novel
DIAMOND HILL
'A vivid, powerful portrait of a vanishing world' - David Nicholls, author of One Day & Sweet Sorrow'A rapid-fire debut with a cinematographer's eye for detail, Diamond Hill interrogates fate, memory and redemption at a filmic velocity befitting its setting in Hong Kong's former Hollywood. Fan strikes a deft balance between agile set-pieces and lingering beauty.' - Naoise Dolan, author of Exciting Times'Gripping and highly accomplished . . . a thoroughly enjoyable and profound exploration of powerlessness, identity and the evolution of a city.' - The Guardian, Book of the Day'Fan is an exuberant chronicler of a lost time and place, delightedly preserving Cantonese slang and profanities... it's a timely consideration of Hong Kong's recent past.' - The Times'Fan creates a textured, unsettled portrait of a territory facing a decisive ending...The dark drama that unfolds is an elegy to that vanished vanishing world.' - The Wall Street Journal'Diamond Hill gleams with pleasurable insights...Memorable moments are sketched by a poet’s hand.' - South China Morning Post‘Fan deftly mixes the sacred with the profane, often on the same page. Just when you decide there’s no room for holiness amid the wreckage, you realize there may in fact be no other option.’ - Kirkus Reviews'Fan’s evocative debut portrays a Hong Kong in transition... and brings poetic language and moving tributes to descriptions of the lost neighborhood. The novel’s aching beauty makes an effective argument for remembering.' - Publishers Weekly'Fan resurrects the neighbourhood as it would have looked in 1987, a decade before Britain's handover of Hong Kong to China - a precarious maze of shacks and open gutters, shaken constantly by the rumblings of the planes flying close overhead from nearby Kai Tak Airport.' - The Straits Times
DIAMOND HILL
'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.'
1987, Hong Kong. Trying to outrun his demons, a young man who calls himself Buddha returns to the bustling place of his birth. He moves into a small Buddhist nunnery in the crumbling neighbourhood of Diamond Hill, where planes landing at the nearby airport fly so close overhead that travellers can see into the rooms of those below.
As Buddha begins to care for the nuns and their neighbours, this pocket of the old city is vanishing. Even the fiery Iron Nun cannot prevent the frequent landslides that threaten the nunnery she fights for, and in the nearby shanty town, a faded film actress who calls herself Audrey Hepburn is hiding a deep secret and trying to survive with her teenage daughter who has a bigger fish to fry.
But no one arrives in Diamond Hill by accident, and Buddha's ties to this place run deeper than he is willing to admit. Can he make peace with his past and survive in this disappearing city?
