Modern Chinese Literature Online Book Club - Session 5

Please join us for the 5th session of our Modern Chinese literature online book club in collaboration with Paper Republic.

All are welcome to attend and you do not need to have attended any of our prior book club sessions. The session is informal, friendly and held in English.

In this session, we will be discussing the story 'Seeing ghosts' by Chan Ho-Kei, translated by Bill Leverett.

You can read the story in English here and the Chinese version is available to read here.

Questions to consider for discussion:

a) Is it clear to you where this story takes place, and how important is the location?

b) What is the purpose of the reveal at the end?

c) Would you place this squarely in the 'ghost story' genre, or is it something else, and if so, what?

About the facilitators:

• Bill Leverett is Associate Lecturer at The Open University. He started studying Chinese in 1985, and lived in Taiwan and Hong Kong from the late eighties to the early nineties. He is an experienced translator and has translated for various clients including the WMA in Hong Kong. He is currently working on several stories by Huang Xianzhi (黄先智). His translation of Seeing ghosts won the 5th Bai Meigui Translation Competition.

• Nicky Harman lives in the UK and translates full-time from Chinese into English, focussing on fiction, literary non-fiction, and occasionally poetry. Several of her translations have been recipients of an English PEN Translates award and she has won a Mao Tai Cup People's Literature Chinese-English translation prize (2015), and first prize in the 2013 China International Translation Contest, Chinese-to-English section, with Jia Pingwa’s Backflow River (倒流河). When not translating, she works on Paper-Republic.org, a non-profit website promoting Chinese literature in translation, where she is also a Trustee.  She was co-Chair of the Translators Association (Society of Authors, UK) from 2014 to 2017. 

• Emily Jones is a founding Trustee of Paper Republic, https://paper-republic.org/, a charity which promotes Chinese literature in English translation. She is a graduate of Chinese Studies from the University of Cambridge (1998 - 2002). She also studied Chinese at the Chinese universities of Ningbo and Qingdao and was the recipient of a British Centre for Literary Translation mentorship in translation in 2011. Her publications include novels such as Black Holes (性之罪 ) by He Jiahong (何家弘) and The Sky Dwellers (天行者) by Liu Xinglong (刘醒龙); short stories such as Fiction and Other Stories (李喬短篇小說精選集) by Lee Chiao (李喬), as well as poetry, and non-fiction for various publishers.

Please sign up here on Eventbrite to attend. 

The session will be held online via Zoom. You can also view this event on our WeChat page. 

The recording from the session can now be viewed below and the transcript is available here.