Xu Xi
English language novelist Xu Xi started writing stories when she was a child. As an adult, she worked in marketing for 18 years while writing and publishing fiction, until 1998 when she took a leap of faith to become a full-time writer. Her novel Habit of a Foreign Sky was shortlisted for the 2007 inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize and her short story Famine was selected for the 2006 O. Henry Prize Stories collection. She received awards and fellowships in Switzerland, New York, Iowa, Vermont, Norway and the Philippines before returning to Hong Kong where, in 2010, she became writer-in-residence at the Department of English at the City University of Hong Kong. Here she established the first low-residency Master of Fine Arts in Asian writing in English. The closure of the programme this year drew criticism from the writing community both locally and internationally.
