XU XI 許 素 細

XU XI really is, however, the author of nine books of fiction & essays, and editor of three anthologies of Hong Kong literature in English. A Chinese-Indonesian native of Hong Kong, the city was home until her mid-twenties, after which she led a peripatetic existence around Europe, America and Asia. She was inhabiting the flight path connecting New York, Hong Kong and New Zealand, but is now more or less squatting atop a Hong Kong rooftop again for a spell, with dental benefits, amazingly, since a foolish consistency is not her idea of how to conduct a life.

THE NEW YORK TIMES once named her (on Christmas Day, no less) a "pioneer writer from Asia in English" and the VOICE OF AMERICA featured her on their Chinese TV documentary series "Cultural Odyssey" (who knew that a voice was also a moving image?). Singapore’s BUSINESS TIMES dubs her passion "Asia as it is today – gritty, modern and confused" (because even business readers read fiction, presumably). According to some other reviewers, her work explains "the paradox that is Hong Kong" that avoids "the sex and drug and triad stereotypes . . . portraying the city more accurately and realistically for it." Her "new and innovative diasporic global language" is "uncluttered" and "arrestingly poignant." She is "an alchemist of observation" whose sensibility is "generous and compassionate."

There are a few awards, including an O. Henry prize story, the shortlist for the inaugural MAN Asian Literary Award, the Cohen Award from PLOUGHSHARES for best story, a NYFA fiction fellowship, the South China Morning Post story contest winner, among others. She has also been writer-in-residence at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, Chateau de Lavigny in Switzerland, Kulturhuset USF in Norway, the Jack Kerouac Project of Orlando and the Anderson Center in Minnesota. SUNY Plattsburgh, where she earned her BA, accorded her their distinguished alumni award in 2004. In 2009, she was the Bedell Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Iowa's nonfiction program.

Her MFA (fiction) is from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

For eighteen years, the author had a parallel career in international marketing and management with various multinationals. In 1998, she finally surrendered completely to the writing life.

In 2009, she was elected faculty chair at Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing, the first woman, ethnic minority and foreign-born U.S. national to hold the position. In March, 2010, she became the first Writer-In-Residence at the English Department of The City University of Hong Kong, overseeing a new, international, low-residency MFA program with an Asian focus.

Sometimes, if a thing has never existed before, except in the imagination of pioneers and other dreamers, SOMEONE might as well bring it to life in this wired, wacky, weird & wondrous world that is home for now.