Dorothy Tse

Dorothy Tse writes primarily in Chinese. Her first short story collection, So Black (《好黑》), was published in 2005, winning the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature the following year.[2] In 2011, she attended The University of Iowa's International Writing Program, and in 2013, A Dictionary of Two Cities (《雙城辭典》), a novel which she co-authored with Hon Lai-chu (韓麗珠), was published, for which Hon and Tse were awarded the 2013 Hong Kong Book Prize.[3][4] Her literary prizes also include Taiwan's Unitas New Fiction Writers’ Award and the Hong Kong Award for Creative Writing in Chinese.[5]

Tse's first English short story, "Woman Fish",[6] a surreal story about a man whose wife turns into a fish, appeared in 2013 in The Guardian. Her first full-length book in English, Snow and Shadow, was published in 2014 by Hong Kong publisher Muse. Snow and Shadow is a collection of short stories from her earlier Chinese books, as well as previously unpublished works, translated by Nicky Harman.[7]

Tse's first solo novel, Owlish, about a professor who falls in love with a mechanical ballerina, was published in Chinese by Aquarius (寶瓶文化) in 2020. In 2023, Natascha Bruce's translation of the novel into English was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK, and Graywolf Press in the US.[8][9][10] In addition to being nominated for the Taipei International Book Exhibition Book Price, the latter translation was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant.[11][12]

Tse writes in a surrealist style. Harman describes her writing as: “surreal tales—fantastic in parts—but made the more effective for being grounded firmly in reality... Dreamscapes interlock with a narrative which, though superficially realistic, itself feels quite unreal.”[13] Similarly, Kit Fan notes in a review of Owlish that the novel inhabits an "uncanny realm in which fiction becomes a series of Russian dolls combining dream and reality."[14]

Acknowledging Tse's many references to the Western canon in the novel, which include "Mephistopheles, Kant, the Brothers Grimm, Lewis Carroll, Kafka, Orwell and Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake", Fan finds "Tse’s acerbic, freewheeling spirit [to be] generically flirtatious, rather than genre-bound."[14] Jane Wallace, meanwhile, has drawn favorable comparisons to the work of E.T.A. Hoffman and Angela Carter, noting along with other critics, however, the extent to which Tse's work is grounded in the unique social and political history of Hong Kong.[15]

Tse is a co-founder of the Hong Kong literary magazine Fleurs des lettres.

• Owlish. 2023-06-06. ISBN 978-1-64445-235-6.