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 moves between poetry and narrative fiction. 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.
In 2018, he won a Northern Writers' Award for Diamond Hill, a novel-in-progress.
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 Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon to be a Visiting Scholar in 2020.
He is represented by the literary agent Matt Turner at Rogers, Coleridge & White.
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
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
Current Projects
Diamond Hill (novel-in-progress)
Winner of a Northern Writers' Award 2018
Kit is working on his debut novel Diamond Hill which portrays the last shanty town in Hong Kong torn apart by property developers, Buddhist nuns, and the Triad during the dramatic period of accelerated development of the 1980s before the handover of the city from Britain to China in 1997. He won a Northern Writers' Award 2018 for fiction from New Writing North to support the project.
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
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'
Poets & Players Reading
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.
