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Yan Ge

Biography

Yan Ge

Yan Ge was born in Sichuan, China. She is a fiction writer in both Chinese and English, and is the author of 13 books in Chinese, including five novels. The first of her Chinese-language novels to be translated and released in the US, STRANGE BEASTS OF CHINA, was one of The New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Yan’s English writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Irish Times, TLS, the Stinging Fly and more. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia where she was the recipient of the UEA International Award for 2018–2019. She lives in Norwich with her husband and son.

Yan Ge

Books by Yan Ge

Elsewhere: Stories
by Yan Ge - Fiction, Short Stories

A young woman bonds with an encampment of poets after a devastating earthquake. Against her better judgment, a college student begins to fall for an acquaintance who might be dead. And a Confucian disciple returns to the Master bearing a jar full of grisly remains. Weaving between reality and dreamy surreality, these nine stories wend toward elsewhere, a comforting, frustrating, just-out-of-reach place familiar to anyone who has ever experienced longing. Through it all, Yan Ge’s protagonists peer thoughtfully at their own feelings of displacement --- physical or emotional, the result of travel, emigration or exile. ELSEWHERE explores the utility (or not) of art in the face of lonesomeness, quotidian and spectacular.

Strange Beasts of China
written by Yan Ge, translated by Jeremy Tiang - Fiction, Magical Realism, Mystery

In the fictional Chinese city of Yong’an, an amateur cryptozoologist is commissioned to uncover the stories of its fabled beasts. These creatures live alongside humans in near-inconspicuousness --- save their greenish skin, serrated earlobes and strange birthmarks. Aided by her elusive former professor and his enigmatic assistant, our narrator sets off to document each beast, and is slowly drawn deeper into a mystery that threatens her very sense of self.