The Ink Cloud Reader

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.

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.