Honey Watson

Last updated

Honey Watson
Occupation
  • Writer, Translator
Education
Genre Horror, Science fiction
Years active2023-present
Notable works
  • Lessons in Birdwatching (2023)

Honey Watson is an English author and translator of literature from Mandarin to English. Her debut science fiction novel Lessons in Birdwatching was published in 2023.

Contents

Early life and education

Watson is from Yorkshire, where she attended Wakefield Girls' High School. [1] She graduated with a first in History from University College London (UCL). [2] [3] She then pursued 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 , Watson 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]

Career

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] She would write from dive bars in Las Vegas. [8]

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] [9]

Bibliography

Novels

Translations

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Su Manshu</span>

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Xi Xi</span> Hong Kong author and poet (1937–2022)

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Su Tong</span> Chinese writer

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leila Aboulela</span> Sudanese writer (born 1964)

Leila Fuad Aboulela is a fiction writer, essayist, and playwright of Sudanese origin based in Aberdeen, Scotland. She grew up in Khartoum, Sudan, and moved to Scotland in 1990 where she began her literary career. Until 2023, Aboulela has published six novels and several short stories, which have been translated into fifteen languages. Her most popular novels, Minaret (2005) and The Translator (1999) both feature the stories of Muslim women in the UK and were longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and Orange Prize. Aboulela's works have been included in publications such as Harper's Magazine, Granta, The Washington Post and The Guardian. BBC Radio has adapted her work extensively and broadcast a number of her plays, including The Insider, The Mystic Life and the historical drama The Lion of Chechnya. The five-part radio serialization of her 1999 novel The Translator was short-listed for the Race In the Media Award (RIMA).

<i>Raise the Red Lantern</i> (novella) 1990 novel by Su Tong

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Feng Jicai</span>

Feng Jicai is a contemporary Chinese author, artist and cultural scholar.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mao Dun Literature Prize</span> Chinese literary award

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fan Wu</span> Chinese-American novelist

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Howard Goldblatt</span> American translator

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.

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."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jenny Erpenbeck</span> German writer and opera director (born 1967)

Jenny Erpenbeck is a German writer and opera director. She won the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The End of Days and the 2024 International Booker Prize for Kairos.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fang Fang</span> Chinese writer (born 1955)

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.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lina Wolff</span> Swedish writer

Lina Wolff is a Swedish novelist, short story writer and translator.

Ye Chun is a Chinese-American writer and literary translator.

Olivia Milburn is a sinologist, author and literary translator who specialises in Chinese cultural history and in Chinese minority groups.

Chen Yan is a Chinese dramatist and novelist best known for his novel The Protagonist which won the 10th Mao Dun Literature Prize in 2019, one of the most prestigious literature prizes in China. He was a delegate to the 17th and 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party.

Liang Hong is a contemporary Chinese author and academic.

Tiffany Tsao is an American-born literary translator and writer based in Sydney, Australia. She has translated a number of Indonesian writers into English, including Norman Erikson Pasaribu, Budi Darma, and Dewi Lestari.

References

  1. "Prefects" (PDF). Wakefield Girls' High School. 2010. p. 10. Retrieved 25 September 2024.
  2. "Training world leaders of the future: student case studies". UCL. 10 October 2017.
  3. "Honey Watson". The Bent Agency.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 Xuyen, Shi; Yu, Ying (14 September 2023). "Honey Watson: Translating out of love for contemporary Chinese literature". People's Daily Online.
  5. "Honey Watson". AngryRobotBooks.
  6. Di Filippo, Paul (17 October 2023). "Paul Di Filippo Reviews Lessons in Birdwatching by Honey Watson". Locus Magazine.
  7. Mercik, Nadya (2023). "Lessons in Birdwatching". British Fantasy Society.
  8. "Careen Towards Annihilation With Lessons in Birdwatching by Honey Watson". Reactor Mag. TOR.com. 26 October 2022.
  9. "The Unfilial: Four Tragic Tales from Modern China". Sinoist Books.