XU XI 許素細 is author of eleven books — five novels and six collections of short fiction & essays — most recently, the novel That Man In Our Lives ( C&R Press, 2016) and Interruptions (HKUMAG/Columbia Univ. Press, 2016-17), a collaborative ekphrastic essay collection with photography by David Clarke. Forthcoming are a memoir Dear Hong Kong: An Elegy for a City (Penguin China, July 1, 2017), Insignificance: Hong Kong Stories (Signal 8 Press, 2018) and This Fish is Fowl: Essays of Being (Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2019-20). She has also edited four anthologies of Hong Kong writing in English.
Awards include an O. Henry prize story, the Ploughshares Cohen award for short fiction, the South China Morning Post story contest prize, a NYFA fiction fellowship; her novel Habit of a Foreign Sky was a finalist for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Her work has received international acclaim: the fiction collection Daughters of Hui was an Asiaweek 1996 top ten books of Asia; her novel The Unwalled City was a Pushcart editor’s choice and named one of HK Magazine’s top fifteen best books about Hong Kong; an essay “The English of My Story” was selected for the notable essays & literary nonfiction list in The Best American Essays, 2016. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies internationally. In 2001, The New York Times named her a “pioneering writer in English from Asia.”
She has taught as regular faculty at low-residency creative writing programs for over sixteen years, and served as faculty chair at the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing. In 2010, she was named Writer-in-Residence at City University of Hong Kong where she established and directed Asia’s first low-residency MFA, an Asia-focused program that graduated poets, fiction and nonfiction writers who continue to publish well and win literary awards internationally (the program was closed, controversially, after only five years). She has been writer-in-residence or visiting writer at several universities, including Arizona State University’s Virginia G. Piper’s Center for Creative Writing, the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction MFA, the Philippines National Writing Workshops at Silliman University in Dumaguete, Stockholm University, Lingnan University in Hong Kong, as well as at the Chateau de Lavigny in Switzerland, Kulturhuset USF in Norway, the Jack Kerouac Project in Florida, among others. Prior to teaching, she had an eighteen-year career in international marketing and management for major multinationals until 1998, when she surrendered completely to her writing life. She holds a MFA in fiction (1985) from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
A Hong Kong-born permanent resident, former Indonesian national and now a U.S. citizen, Xu long inhabited the flight path connecting New York, Hong Kong and the South Island of New Zealand. She currently co-directs Authors at Large and splits time between New York and Hong Kong. Follow her @xuxiwriter on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram.
