Simon Shieh – författare

Ten Thousand Miles of Clouds and Moons gathers sixteen phenomenalwriters of the Chinese language in their English debut: eight fictionwriters, six poets, and two essayists. Amongst these dazzling tellings,the planets are being pulled closer to the earth; a treasured classicalfiction holds the secrets of the universe; shameful acts of urbanennui are committed over- and underground; a couple navigates thephantasmagoric border between life and death; the classrooms of theeighties and nineties are fleetingly free.Ranging from cityscapes tomountain ranges, ancestral lands to parallel worlds, these authorsexhibit a panoramic vista of contemporary Chinese-language writingat its most imaginative and incisive, balancing intellectual power withlyrical enchantment to lend insight into a nation oscillating betweentradition and modernity, apocalyptic visions and pedestrian loves,provocation and nostalgia, reality and dreamscapes.

Winner of the 2022 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Terrance Hayes.The debut collection from Simon Shieh, Master is a stark, surreal, and imagistic reckoning with a traumatic past. Master follows the speaker's struggle with masculinity from a martial arts school in upstate New York to a boxing academy in Beijing. Language emerges in this collection not as a neutral witness to a boy’s subjugation, but as the very tool of hegemony, though one which also holds the key to its own undoing, and therefore to freedom. As much as Master is the story of pain, it is also a journey to healing, illuminating that while violence can be our patrimony, it does not have to be our destiny.