About
XU XI 許素細, an Indonesian-Chinese-American from Hong Kong, has published sixteen books— five novels, nine prose collections, one memoir, one co-authored textbook —and also edited four anthologies of English Hong Kong literature. Her newest title, HORIZON HONG KONG: SELECTED STORIES will be released July 2026 by Gaudy Boy, New York. She held the Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, was writer-in-residence at Arizona State University, City University of Hong Kong, University of Iowa, and directed two international MFA’s in creative writing and literary translation. Previously, she worked in marketing and management in the U.S. and Asia at The Asian Wall Street Journal, Federal Express, a Wall Street law firm, Pinkerton’s and Cathay Pacific Airways. A diehard transnational, she now lives between New York and the rest of the world.
Featured Work
This Fish is Fowl: Essays of Being
In This Fish Is Fowl Xu Xi offers the transnational and feminist perspective of a contemporary “glocalized” American life. Her quirky, darkly comic, and obsessively personal essays emerge from her diverse professional career as a writer, business executive, entrepreneur, and educator. From her origins in Hong Kong, she writes her way around the globe. Caring for her mother with Alzheimer’s in Hong Kong becomes the rhythmic accompaniment to an enforced, long-term, long-distance relationship with her partner and home in New York. In between she reflects on all her selves, which are defined by those myriad monikers of existence. As an author who began life as a novelist and fiction writer, she also considers the nature of genre, which snakes its way through these essays. In her linguistic trip across the comic tragedy that is globalism, she wonders about the mystery of humanity and the future of our world at this complicated and precarious moment in human existence. This collection is a twenty-first-century blend of the essayist traditions of both West and East. Xu's acerbic, deft prose shows her to be a descendant of both Michel de Montaigne and Lu Xun, with influences from stepparent Jonathan Swift.
Other Works
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Chinese Walls (novel), 2nd edition
2024
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Daughters of Hui (fiction collection), 2nd edition
2024
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The Art and Craft of Asian Stories: A Writer's Guide and Anthology (co-authored with Robin Hemley)
2021
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Dear Hong Kong: An Elegy for a City (memoir)
2017
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Interruptions (ekphrastic essays), collaboration with photographer David Clarke
2017
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That Man in Our Lives
2016
Awards and Recognition
- Honorary doctorate (DFA), State University of New York, 2024
- Fiction Collective Two 2024 Catherine Doctorow fiction prize, finalist for novel manuscript The Milton Man
- Jenks Chair in Contemporary Literature, College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts (endowed chair/visiting professor 2021-2025)
- McCraith House, Writer-in-Residence, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Australia, 2016
- Distinguished Writer-in-Residence, Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, Arizona State University, Tempe (2016)
- Distinguished Asian Writer, Philippines National Writing Workshop, Silliman University, Dumaguete, Philippines (2010)
- Bedell Distinguished Visiting Writer, University of Iowa MFA in Nonfiction Writing program, Iowa City, Iowa (2009)
- Inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize, shortlist for novel manuscript Habit of a Foreign Sky
- O. Henry Prize Story for “Famine” (2006)
- New York State Foundation for the Arts Fiction Fellow, New York (1991)
