Honey Watson | |
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Occupation |
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Nationality | British |
Education | New York University, Yenching Academy Peking University |
Genre | Horror, Science fiction |
Years active | 2023-present |
Notable works |
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Honey Watson is an English author and translator of literature from Mandarin to English. Watson currently resides in Las Vegas, where she gets inspiration from her interests of dive bars, fashion and hockey. [1]
Watson graduated with a first in history from UCL [2] [3] before pursuing the Master's programme at Yenching Academy, a graduate college of Peking University, in Beijing. She states she did not speak a word of Chinese before arriving in Beijing. [4]
After reading the assigned reading, Lu Xun's Diary of a Madman she insisted on changing majors to Chinese literature, and began the process of self-teaching herself to translate literature. [4]
Following Yenching, Watson pursued a PhD in Comparative Literature from NYU. [5]
Chinese novelist Su Tong gave a month-long series of lectures at NYU, which Watson assisted by providing English language translations of his discussed stories throughout. This would lead to Watson translating a short story collection of Tong's called Midnight Stories: A short story collection from the mind behind Raise the Red Lantern. [4]
Her debut novel Lessons in Birdwatching was published by Angry Robot in 2023 in the US and UK to positive reviews. [6] [7]
Watson's first novel-length translation was Fan Wu's Souls Left Behind: A WW1 Chinese Labour Corps Novel. [4]
She contributed to a collection of short stories by Yao Emei, where each story was translated by a different translator, called The Unfilial: Four Tragic Tales from Modern China. [4] [8]
Oku no Hosomichi, translated as The Narrow Road to the Deep North and The Narrow Road to the Interior, is a major work of haibun by the Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō, considered one of the major texts of Japanese literature of the Edo period. The first edition was published posthumously in 1702.
Su Manshu was a Chinese writer, poet, painter, revolutionist, and translator. His original name was Su Xuanying, Su had been named as a writer of poetry and romantic love stories in the history of early modern Chinese literature. But he was most commonly known as a Buddhist monk, a poetry monk, "the monk of sentiment”, and “the revolutionary monk”. Su was born out of wedlock in Yokohama, Japan in 1884. His father was a Cantonese merchant, and his mother was his father's Japanese maid. His ancestral home was in Zhongshan city, Guangdong Province, China. He died at the age of 34 due to a stomach disease in Shanghai.
Hsi Hsi/Sai Sai/Xi Xi was the pseudonym of the Hong Kong author and poet Cheung Yin, "Ellen"/Zhang Yan. She was born in Shanghai, and moved to Hong Kong at the age of twelve. She was formerly a teacher and had been a Hong Kong-based writer. Her works are also popular in Taiwan and mainland China. She had become a rather well-known figure to many secondary school students in Hong Kong. This was due in particular to one of her essays, "Shops" (店鋪), which was adopted as reading material for the Chinese Language paper in the Hong Kong Certificate of Education Examination (HKCEE) by the Hong Kong Examinations Authority of the time. In 2019, Hsi Hsi was the recipient of the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature.
Martha Wells is an American writer of speculative fiction. She has published a number of fantasy novels, young adult novels, media tie-ins, short stories, and nonfiction essays on fantasy and science fiction subjects. Her novels have been translated into twelve languages. Wells has won four Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards and three Locus Awards for her science fiction series The Murderbot Diaries. She is also known for her fantasy series Ile-Rien and The Books of the Raksura. Wells is praised for the complex, realistically detailed societies she creates; this is often credited to her academic background in anthropology.
Tong Zhonggui, known by the pen name of Su Tong is a Chinese writer. He was born in Suzhou and lives in Nanjing.
David Hawkes was a British sinologist and translator. After he was introduced to Japanese through codebreaking during the Second World War, Hawkes studied Chinese and Japanese at Oxford University between 1945 and 1947, before studying at Peking University from 1948 to 1951. He then returned to Oxford, where he completed his D.Phil. and later became Shaw Professor of Chinese. In 1971, Hawkes resigned his position to focus entirely on his translation of the famous Chinese novel The Story of the Stone, which was published in three volumes between 1973 and 1980. He retired in 1984 to rural Wales before returning to live in Oxford in his final years.
Raise the Red Lantern, originally known as Wives and Concubines, is a 1990 novella by Su Tong, published by Yuan-Liou Publishing Co. (遠流出版公司), that describes a female former university student whose mind is broken by the concubine system in 1930s China. It was adapted into the 1991 film, Raise the Red Lantern, by Zhang Yimou.
Mao Dun Literature Prize is a prize for novels, established in the will of prominent Chinese writer Mao Dun and sponsored by the China Writers Association. Awarded every four years, it is one of the most prestigious literature prizes in China. It was first awarded in 1982.
Fan Wu is a bilingual Chinese-American novelist and short story writer. She often translates her own work between English and Chinese. She has expressed her dilemma in choosing which language to use.
Howard Goldblatt is a literary translator of numerous works of contemporary Chinese fiction, including The Taste of Apples by Huang Chunming and The Execution of Mayor Yin by Chen Ruoxi. Goldblatt also translated works of Chinese novelist and 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Mo Yan, including six of Mo Yan's novels and collections of stories. He was a Research Professor of Chinese at the University of Notre Dame from 2002 to 2011.
Hualing Nieh Engle, née Nieh Hua-ling, is a Chinese novelist, fiction writer, and poet. She is a professor emerita at the University of Iowa.
Ajeet Cour is an Indian writer who writes in Punjabi. She is a recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Padma Shri, the fourth-highest civilian award by the Government of India.
Shi Tiesheng was a Chinese novelist, known for his story which was the basis of the film Life on a String. The China Daily stated regarding his essay about the park near where he lived, "Many critics have considered I and the Temple of Earth as one of the best Chinese prose essays of the 20th century."
Fang Fang, pen name of Wang Fang, is a Chinese writer, known for her literary depictions of the working poor. She won the Lu Xun Literary Prize in 2010. Born in Nanjing, she attended Wuhan University in 1978 to study Chinese. In 1975, she began to write poetry and in 1982, her first novel was published. She has since written several novels, some of which have been honored by Chinese national-level literary prizes. Fang garnered international attention for her Wuhan Diary, documenting the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, and has used her platform to call for an end to internet censorship in China.
Ken Liu is an American author of science fiction and fantasy. Liu has won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards for his novel translations and original short fiction, which has appeared in F&SF, Asimov's, Analog, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and multiple "Year's Best" anthologies.
Tale of the Pipa is a Chinese nanxi play written by the playwright Gao Ming during the late Yuan dynasty. There are French, German, English translations of the play, and an English novelization-translation.
Patrick Dewes Hanan was a New Zealand scholar of Chinese literature who was the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University. A sinologist, he specialised in pre-20th-century vernacular fiction.
Lina Wolff is a Swedish novelist, short story writer and translator.
Olivia Milburn is a sinologist, author and literary translator who specialises in Chinese cultural history and in Chinese minority groups.
Liang Hong is a contemporary Chinese author and academic.