XU XI è¨±ç´ ç´° is a Chinese-Indonesian native of Hong Kong. The city was home to her until she moved to the U.S. in 1981 where she eventually became a citizen. She currently lives between New York and Hong Kong.
Xu began writing as a child and never stopped. Her earliest short fiction was broadcast on the BBC and published in literary journals in the U.S. and Asia. In 1994, her controversial first novel Chinese Walls was published to critical acclaim, and launched her career as an edgy new Asian writer. Her second book, a collection of short fiction, appeared in 1996 and was named a top ten "best book of Asia" by Asiaweek. Hong Kong Rose, her second novel published in 1997 was a Hong Kong bestseller, and first introduced the character Gordon "Gordie" Ashberry, the protagonist of That Man In Our Lives. Gordie appeared in her next two novels, The Unwalled City (2001) and Habit of a Foreign Sky (2010) and he remains her most enigmatic fictional creation. Xu has also published three other collections of short fiction and essays, and recently launched her eleventh book Interruptions, an ekphrastic essay collection in conversation with photographs by David Clarke which was on exhibit at the University Museum & Art Gallery in Hong Kong.
Since 1998, she has taught creative writing at universities and literary centers in the U.S., Asia and Europe. A former faculty chair of the low-residency Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) in writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, Xu also established and directed Asia’s first low-residency international MFA at City University of Hong Kong as their Writer-in-Residence. In an earlier career that paralleled her literary one, she held management positions at businesses in Asia and the U.S., including at The Asian Wall Street Journal, Leo Burnett Advertising, Federal Express, Pinkerton’s and the New York law firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy. Earlier this year, she was Distinguished Visiting Writer-in-Residence at the Piper Writers House, Arizona State University in Tempe. She is the co-founder of Authors At Large.
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XU XI è¨±ç´ ç´° is a “pioneer writer in English from Asia,” so named in 2001 by The New York Times. Earlier critically acclaimed titles include the novel Habit of a Foreign Sky (Haven Books, 2010), a finalist for the Man Asian Literary Prize, plus three earlier novels and four collections of short fiction & essays, most recently Access Thirteen Tales (Signal 8 Press, 2011). Her latest work is Interruptions (HKUMAG, 2016), essays in conversation with photography by David Clarke. She is also editor of four anthologies of Hong Kong literature in English.
Critics have called her writing “smart, eloquent, cosmopolitan,” “indispensable work of contemporary fiction,” “accomplished,” “arrestingly poignant,” “keenly observant, generous and compassionate.” She has been praised as a “truly international writer” and “cultural anthropologist” whose “unparalleled literary reach” embraces “a new and innovative diasporic global language.” And her fictional characters are rendered “fully human in their contradictions and complexity” as well as “riveting . . recognizable, daunting and beautifully drawn.”
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