Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023
Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023
A The Irish Times Book of the Year
In his disquieting third collection The Ink Cloud Reader, Kit Fan takes enormous risks linguistically, formally and visually to process the news of a sudden illness and the threat of mortality, set against the larger chaos of his beloved city Hong Kong and our broken planet. These shape-shifting poems are sensitive to anxiety and to beauty, questioning the turbulent climate of our time while celebrating the power of ink – of reading and writing.
About the Author :
Kit Fan is a poet, novelist and critic born and educated in Hong Kong before moving to the UK at twenty-one. His first poetry collection, Paper Scissors Stone (2011), won the Hong Kong University International Poetry Prize. As Slow as Possible (2018) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and one of the Irish Times Books of the Year. He was shortlisted twice for the Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize. He won the Northern Writers Awards for Fiction and for Poetry, the Times Stephen Spender Poetry Translation Prize, and Poetry Magazine Editors' Prize for Reviewing. His debut novel is Diamond Hill (2021). The Ink Cloud Reader is his third poetry collection. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.
Review :
'In The Ink Cloud Reader, Kit Fan's moving, wise and fluid poems grapple with the forces 'converting loss to some form / of chaos'. The book's vivid portrait of a marriage, quickened by sickness and the threat of separation, presents love as a play of shadow and light. Fan gets stranger, more daring, with each successive book: he is an essential poet, and one I will always return to.'
Sarah Howe
'The compressed narratives in The Ink Cloud Reader demonstrate both lyric intensity and a remarkable dramatic reach. In this impressive third collection, Kit Fan's restless, explorative, compositional impulse is evident from first to last [...] The poems in this collection - personal, political, edgy, sometimes provocative - have a unifying voice both intriguing and wholly original.'
David Harsent
'Kit Fan's poems are a kind of lyric vortex: imagistic fictions that wrap themselves around a hard, lyrical, personal centre, something like the complexity of a seed. This collection holds at its core the tension of what to say and how to say it, gloriously in celebration of ambivalence, and questioning.'
Rachael Allen
'A moving, lyrically potent collection charting the interconnected impacts of political and personal fracture... Here the losses of place and the losses of the body tumble into each other, creating a painfully raw yet deeply affecting poetic universe.'
Rebecca Tamás, The Guardian
'...an impressively skilful, dazzlingly inventive and sometimes moving book that speaks strongly to the confusions of contemporary life.'
Edmund Prestwich, The North
