Kit Fan – författare

'A rapid-fire debut with a cinematographer's eye for detail... Fan strikes a deft balance between agile set-pieces and lingering beauty.' Naoise Dolan 'A vivid, powerful portrait of a vanishing world.' David Nicholls'Do you know what it was like here? You wouldn't believe the glamour. We had our own film studio, redbrick houses for the stars, even Jackie Chan. Now look at us - the Hollywood of the Orient will soon be gone altogether.'1987, Hong Kong. Trying to outrun his demons, a young man who calls himself Buddha returns to the bustling place of his birth. He moves into a small Buddhist nunnery in the crumbling neighbourhood of Diamond Hill, where planes landing at the nearby airport fly so close overhead that travellers can see into the rooms of those below.As Buddha begins to care for the nuns and their neighbours, this pocket of the old city is vanishing. Even the fiery Iron Nun cannot prevent the frequent landslides that threaten the nunnery she fights for, and in the nearby shanty town, a faded film actress who calls herself Audrey Hepburn is hiding a deep secret and trying to survive with her teenage daughter who has a bigger fish to fry.But no one arrives in Diamond Hill by accident, and Buddha's ties to this place run deeper than he is willing to admit. Can he make peace with his past and survive in this disappearing city?Beautifully written and utterly compelling, Diamond Hill is a gorgeous love letter that perfectly captures a lost place, filled with unforgettable characters. If you love books by Hanya Yanagihara, Colm Tóibín and Ocean Vuong, you'll adore this haunting and evocative novel.What people are saying about Diamond Hill:'The best debut I've read in ages... A glorious luminosity to the writing and the reading experience is rather like looking into a kaleidoscope and giving it several twirls.' Cathy Rentzenbrink 'A gripping and highly accomplished debut... A thoroughly enjoyable and profound exploration of powerlessness, identity and the evolution of a city.' Guardian'Fan is an exuberant chronicler of a lost time and place... It's a timely consideration of Hong Kong's recent past.' The Times'An exhilarating and original tale, Diamond Hill marks award-winning Fan as a writer to watch.' Cosmopolitan 'Fan creates a textured, unsettled portrait of a territory facing a decisive ending... The dark drama that unfolds is an elegy to that vanished vanishing world.' The Wall Street Journal'Gleams with pleasurable insights... Memorable moments are sketched by a poet's hand.' South China Morning Post

'A rapid-fire debut with a cinematographer's eye for detail... Fan strikes a deft balance between agile set-pieces and lingering beauty.' Naoise Dolan 'A vivid, powerful portrait of a vanishing world.' David Nicholls'Do you know what it was like here? You wouldn't believe the glamour. We had our own film studio, redbrick houses for the stars, even Jackie Chan. Now look at us - the Hollywood of the Orient will soon be gone altogether.'1987, Hong Kong. Trying to outrun his demons, a young man who calls himself Buddha returns to the bustling place of his birth. He moves into a small Buddhist nunnery in the crumbling neighbourhood of Diamond Hill, where planes landing at the nearby airport fly so close overhead that travellers can see into the rooms of those below.As Buddha begins to care for the nuns and their neighbours, this pocket of the old city is vanishing. Even the fiery Iron Nun cannot prevent the frequent landslides that threaten the nunnery she fights for, and in the nearby shanty town, a faded film actress who calls herself Audrey Hepburn is hiding a deep secret and trying to survive with her teenage daughter who has a bigger fish to fry.But no one arrives in Diamond Hill by accident, and Buddha's ties to this place run deeper than he is willing to admit. Can he make peace with his past and survive in this disappearing city?Beautifully written and utterly compelling, Diamond Hill is a gorgeous love letter that perfectly captures a lost place, filled with unforgettable characters. If you love books by Hanya Yanagihara, Colm Tóibín and Ocean Vuong, you'll adore this haunting and evocative novel.What people are saying about Diamond Hill:'The best debut I've read in ages... A glorious luminosity to the writing and the reading experience is rather like looking into a kaleidoscope and giving it several twirls.' Cathy Rentzenbrink 'A gripping and highly accomplished debut... A thoroughly enjoyable and profound exploration of powerlessness, identity and the evolution of a city.' Guardian'Fan is an exuberant chronicler of a lost time and place... It's a timely consideration of Hong Kong's recent past.' The Times'An exhilarating and original tale, Diamond Hill marks award-winning Fan as a writer to watch.' Cosmopolitan 'Fan creates a textured, unsettled portrait of a territory facing a decisive ending... The dark drama that unfolds is an elegy to that vanished vanishing world.' The Wall Street Journal'Gleams with pleasurable insights... Memorable moments are sketched by a poet's hand.' South China Morning Post

Amber Fan, a young Oxford-educated chef, opens the first Chinese fusion joint in London's Chinatown following the failure of her father's traditional restaurant. When her parents decide to return to Hong Kong, taking with them their young son Bobby as well as the haunting secret surrounding his birth, Amber is left alone in London. Set in the aftermath of Hong Kong's return to Chinese rule, Goodbye Chinatown shows a family torn between two countries. Amber throws herself into her career to escape the painful cycle of family separations and reunions. The tastes and smells spark off every page in Kit Fan's latest novel, making for a truly multisensorial reading experience. Offering a behind-the-scenes of this suburb of London's hospitality economy, and using food to reflect on identity, Goodbye Chinatown paints a portrait of an enterprising emigre who, faced with divided loyalties, invents her own language for home through the culinary arts.

Kit Fan’s As Slow As Possible is a book of changes, of unlikely bridges between far-flung places and times, a collection of shape-shifting, trans-migrant poems that travel across geographies and time zones. There are poems about the slow life of trees which establish links across time and space, about environmental catastrophe, art in war zones, artworks that travel across time, all of them reflecting on mortality and survival. Divided into three parts, the book weaves back and forwards between East and West, past and present, art and memory, pivoting around a central sequence called ‘Genesis’, an uncanny re-telling of Chinese creation myths in the language of the Authorised Version. The first part of the book is a brilliantly chromatic travelogue, while the collection ends with a more grounded sequence, ‘Twelve Months’, focusing on a kind of diurnal poetic house-keeping, based on the poet’s migrant life in Yorkshire.

Kit Fan’s As Slow As Possible is a book of changes, of unlikely bridges between far-flung places and times, a collection of shape-shifting, trans-migrant poems that travel across geographies and time zones. There are poems about the slow life of trees which establish links across time and space, about environmental catastrophe, art in war zones, artworks that travel across time, all of them reflecting on mortality and survival. Divided into three parts, the book weaves back and forwards between East and West, past and present, art and memory, pivoting around a central sequence called ‘Genesis’, an uncanny re-telling of Chinese creation myths in the language of the Authorised Version. The first part of the book is a brilliantly chromatic travelogue, while the collection ends with a more grounded sequence, ‘Twelve Months’, focusing on a kind of diurnal poetic house-keeping, based on the poet’s migrant life in Yorkshire.