KIT FAN
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 critic.
His debut novel Diamond Hill will be published in May 2021 by Dialogue Books/Little, Brown and World Editions.
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 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 winner of a Northern Writers' Award, The Times Stephen Spender Poetry Translation Prize, and the POETRY magazine Editors Prize for Reviewing.
He is represented by the literary agent Matt Turner at Rogers, Coleridge & White.
Debut Novel
Diamond Hill
Pre-order at Bookshop UK, Foyles, Waterstones, WH Smith, and your local bookshop.
'A vivid, powerful portrait of a vanishing world' - David Nicholls, author of One Day & Sweet Sorrow
‘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
'Diamond Hill breathes beauty . . . Kit Fan skillfully weaves a story of loss and of being lost; a story of tragic mistakes, which haunts the reader long after the final page has been turned' - Okechukwu Nzelu, author of The Private Joys of Nnenna Maloney
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.
Poetry Collections
‘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’Reilly
Reviews of As Slow As Possible:
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
Events
Current events
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 University of Liverpool: Launch of Diamond Hill with Xin Ran
Mid May 2021 Singapore: Instagram launch of Diamond Hill with Elaine Chiew
Mid May 2021 University of York: Launch of Diamond Hill
Previous 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
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.
Poems
Hong Kong and the Echo
What do we know but that we face
One another in this place?
– W. B. Yeats, 'Man and the Echo'
HK. I loved my mountains, rivers, and trees
long before towers and families, but if the only way
the sea can speak to the hills is through the moon
I will speak to you from the ink-dark
about the changing tides, the slow equivocal pain
of transition, how things are moving away
from the norm, the deceptive comfort
of a norm, the fading neon noises
on Mong Kok streets, the kind of blue and yellow
you’ll only find in my heart, the Lion Rock spirit
and the endangered species named after me:
the grouper, cascade frog, incense tree.
Echo. What do we know but that?
HK. What’s the meaning of life in numbers?
Although I count every second of mine
I remember nothing of those Crown-
appointed governors come and gone who said
nothing, did nothing, changed nothing.
What are the promises in a red flag with five stars
shooting out from one bauhinia?
Twenty-two moon-calendars since I was re-unorphaned
I stray and obey like a tree, half-crown, half-root,
branching out and bedding in, each growth year
a scar tissue erased by the smudges
of shared stocks, fireworks, new railways and bridges.
Echo. We face one another? We face one another?
HK. What am I but the high-rise windows
reflecting the sun and the lives below?
Come, look into every single one
and find millions of homemade voices in an impasse,
in fissures, in boxlike existences
where one language is never enough.
High above I see black kites, sometimes white-bell
sea eagles gliding between glass and cliff,
drones and signals, eyeing the quick chance
while larks, thrushes, and titmice are twittering
in bamboo cages, bird to bird, sharing
the captive sky with their distant counterparts
as one sun drops under the horizon
and a different one rises.
Echo. In this place? In this place? In this place?
(Published in World Literature Today, April 2019 issue)
Migrant
for Ziad Elmarsafy
Months have passed and we have seen enough of death
this winter that even though seeing these chlorophyll
green leaves suckle on the sun again and tower over Russell Square
broadcasting C’est la vie on this one June day aren’t enough
for the sea-deaths, land-deaths and air-deaths un-extinguishing
somewhere else, not yet out-of-sight, out-of-mind. Not yet here too,
this corner kingdom we’ve elected to live within still seemingly
prospers like the summer holm-oak by the Hotel Russell
you’ll come to frequent in your new life in the capital.
People lazing about in the sun as in La Grande Jatte, children shrieking
in the fountain, a father carrying his bum-bare boy on his shoulders,
an old couple walking past, catching our eye, still walking
past. So many of us, I want to know every single life, what
brought them here today, who they are, and how long they will live.
We all have it, living it, re-living it, shaping this one-off malleable
thing over and over that even though all winter we’ve seen
what could happen to it, we still sit on the bench among the perishable
green, chattering about it as if it won’t leave us just like that.
(Published in the anthology Wretched Stranger (Boiler House Press, 2018) which commemorates the anniversary of the June 2016 EU Referendum and in solidarity through struggles ongoing and to come. Proceeds of the book will be donated to charities fighting for the rights of refugees.)
Links to a selection of poems published online:
Hokkaido, Poetry
Hong Kong and the Echo, World Literature Today
Vitreous Humour, The Poetry Review
The Painted Skin, The Poetry Review
June, by Bei Dao, Modern Poetry in Translation
The Burning of Books, Prairie Schooner
Rachel Whiteread’s Ghost, Soanyway
From The Bostonians, The Compass Magazine
Among School Teachers, Lacuna
Late, Poetry Book Society
Mother's Ink, Cha
How Cangjie Invented Chinese Characters, Cha
Lines from "Another Poem of Insomnia", Cha
Ghost Letter, Cha
"Chinese Poetry" (in translation), Cha
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.
Literary Criticism
Reviews:
Book Chapters:
Articles:
Contact
© 2020