Dorothy Tse Hiu-hung (, born 1977) is a
Hong Kong
Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China ( abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delt ...
author, editor, and an assistant professor of creative writing at
Hong Kong Baptist University
Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) is a publicly funded tertiary liberal arts education, liberal arts institution with a Christian ethics, Christian education heritage. It was established as Hong Kong Baptist College with the support of Ame ...
.
Writing career
Dorothy Tse writes primarily in Chinese. Her first short story collection, ''So Black'' (《好黑》), was published in 2005, winning the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature the following year. In 2011, she attended
The University of Iowa's International Writing Program, and in 2013, ''A Dictionary of Two Cities'' (《雙城辭典》), a novel which she co-authored with
Hon Lai-chu
Hon Lai-chu (, born 1978) is a Hong Kong writer. She has authored eight books in Chinese and won numerous awards, including the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature for fiction, Taiwan’s Unitas New Writer’s Novella first prize, and t ...
(韓麗珠), was published, for which Hon and Tse were awarded the 2013 Hong Kong Book Prize. Her literary prizes also include Taiwan's Unitas New Fiction Writers’ Award and the Hong Kong Award for Creative Writing in Chinese.
Tse's first English short story, "Woman Fish", a surreal story about a man whose wife turns into a fish, appeared in 2013 in ''
The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
''. Her first full-length book in English, ''Snow and Shadow'', was published in 2014 by Hong Kong publisher
Muse
In ancient Greek religion and mythology, the Muses ( grc, Μοῦσαι, Moûsai, el, Μούσες, Múses) are the inspirational goddesses of literature, science, and the arts. They were considered the source of the knowledge embodied in the ...
. ''Snow and Shadow'' is a collection of short stories from her earlier Chinese books, as well as previously unpublished works, translated by
Nicky Harman
Nicky Harman is a UK-based prize-winning literary translator, working from Chinese to English and focussing on contemporary fiction, literary non-fiction, and occasionally poetry, by a wide variety of authors. When not translating, she spends time ...
.
Tse's first solo novel, ', about a professor who falls in love with a mechanical ballerina, was published in Chinese by Aquarius (寶瓶文化) in 2020. In 2023,
Natascha Bruce
Natascha Bruce is a British writer and translator of Chinese fiction and nonfiction. She currently resides in Amsterdam.
Biography
Bruce graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2010 with a Bachelor's degree in Chinese, focusing on cont ...
's translation of the novel into English was published by
Fitzcarraldo Editions
Fitzcarraldo Editions is an independent book publisher based in London, specialising in literary fiction and long-form essays.
History
Founded in 2014 by Jacques Testard, it focuses on ambitious, imaginative, and innovative writing, both in ...
in the UK, and
Graywolf Press
Graywolf Press is an Independent publisher, independent, non-profit publishing, publisher located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Graywolf Press publishes fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.
Graywolf Press collaborates with organizations such as the Co ...
in the US. In addition to being nominated for the
Taipei International Book Exhibition Book Price, the latter translation was awarded a
PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant
The PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants were established in 2003 by PEN America (formerly PEN American Center) following a gift of $730,000 by Michael Henry Heim, a noted literary translator. Heim believed that there was a 'dismayingly low number of ...
.
Influences and themes
Tse writes in a surrealist style. Harman describes her writing as: “surreal tales—fantastic in parts—but made the more effective for being grounded firmly in reality... Dreamscapes interlock with a narrative which, though superficially realistic, itself feels quite unreal.” Similarly, Kit Fan notes in a review of ''Owlish'' that the novel inhabits an "uncanny realm in which fiction becomes a series of Russian dolls combining dream and reality."
Acknowledging Tse's many references to the
Western canon
The Western canon is the body of high culture literature, music, philosophy, and works of art that are highly valued in the West; works that have achieved the status of classics. However, not all these works originate in the Western world, and ...
in the novel, which include "Mephistopheles, Kant, the Brothers Grimm, Lewis Carroll, Kafka, Orwell and Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake", Fan finds "Tse’s acerbic, freewheeling spirit
o be
O, or o, is the fifteenth letter and the fourth vowel letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''o'' (pronounced ), plu ...
generically flirtatious, rather than genre-bound."
Jane Wallace, meanwhile, has drawn favorable comparisons to the work of
E.T.A. Hoffman and
Angela Carter
Angela Olive Pearce (formerly Carter, Stalker; 7 May 1940 – 16 February 1992), who published under the name Angela Carter, was an English novelist, short story writer, poet, and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism, and picar ...
, noting along with other critics, however, the extent to which Tse's work is grounded in the unique social and political history of Hong Kong.
Editorial work
Tse is a co-founder of the Hong Kong literary magazine ''
Fleurs des lettres
''Fleurs des lettres'' () is a Chinese bi-monthly youth literature magazine. It is supported by The Hong Kong Arts Development Council.
Publication
Launched in April 2006, ''Fleurs des Lettres'' is now one of the literature magazines in Hong Kong ...
.''
Works in English
*
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Tse, Dorothy
1977 births
Living people
Hong Kong novelists
Hong Kong women writers
Chinese women novelists
International Writing Program alumni