After studying Chinese at university I taught English in China, Japan and Italy, before deciding to return to Leeds to do my PhD, spending four happy years researching monsters and Pu Songling’s Liaozhai zhiyi, or Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. (There’s a lovely translation by John Minford of a selection of the tales). I also found a brilliantly supportive writing community in Leeds, including the Leeds Writers’ Circle, which continues to provide the best writing education anyone could hope for. In 2012 I was lucky enough to go to the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop, for science fiction and fantasy, which was when I started writing more seriously, and gaining many rejections (but a few vital acceptances) for short stories.
In 2018 I was part of the first cohort of writers in the Northern Short Story Academy, which provides opportunities and development for short story writers in Yorkshire, and is another part of the flourishing literary scene in Leeds (which includes the Northern Short Story Festival and the Leeds Lit Fest). I’d also been working on a novel which had grown out of a short story written at Clarion West and later published in Interzone magazine. I sent the first chapters off to the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize (with only minutes to spare before the deadline), and was amazed and delighted to be shortlisted and eventually win. The competition introduced me not only to the fantastic writers on the shortlist, but also to my agent, the wonderful Nelle Andrew. And in 2021 I was very proud to receive a Northern Debut Award from New Writing North, who provide huge support for writers in the north of England.
I currently teach in East Asian Studies at the University of Leeds, and am deputy director of the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing. I also a co-editor of Samovar, a bilingual online magazine of translated speculative fiction. My novel The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands will be published in 2024 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in the UK and Flatiron in the US.