Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your career/published works or work-in-progress, including your Masters project(s)?

I am from Sichuan, China. I graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University in 2010 and worked as a multimedia journalist for several years. After quitting my job, I travelled around the world for more than a year and visited remote places including Antarctica, Ethiopia’s Tigray Region, and Rapa Nui. I spent nearly half of 2019 in Paris, researching my novel, which has ultimately become my Master’s project, Parasité: A very Serious Tale about Fools and Foolish Love. Parasité is what a Wes Anderson film might read like in high-concept literary fiction. In an animated style that’s an integral part of the East Asian culture, Parasité journeys across a century from contemporary China to interwar Paris and ultimately sings an ode to artistic aspirations and universal love. 

How do you think being part of the Manchester Writing School community has helped your writing career?

I’m glad to have met many fellow writers through the programme, who share similar aspirations, read broadly, and write differently. During the workshops and Reading Novel units, my classmates and I critiqued each other’s work (even the exercises) and critically supported each other. For me, it was an inspiring experience.

What did you find was your most valuable experience as part of the Manchester Writing School? What were the highlights?

My visionary teachers at the Manchester Writing School have helped me decode novel writing and see the architecture of fiction from the inside. Like a building, a novel has its technical infrastructure, which is often and perhaps rightfully invisible. The good thing is that writing techniques, although ever-evolving, are still teachable (meanwhile, as a writer, I must find my voice and the soul of my story by myself). It’s also thanks to the Creative Writing programme that I can better recognise and cherish the art and ambitions in others’ work. In that sense, I’ve become a better, happier, and hungrier reader, which has, in turn, significantly improved my writing.

What advice would you give to students looking at studying at the Manchester Writing School, or just starting out on the course?

Every book that I read for the Reading Novel units has taught me a lot. The exercises are thoughtfully designed, I think, for students to practice a variety of writing techniques (prolepsis, defamiliarisation, writing in the second person, etc), and I’m glad to have done most of them. These days, I still endeavour to read from a writer’s perspective. I ask myself, for example, how does the story transition from one point of view to another, if it is told from multiple perspectives? How does the writer make time shifts or change the narrative tempo? How does the narrative zoom out to omniscience or zoom in on a character and explore their psychology? Questions like these have helped me understand the engineering works of a novel, upon which the story, characters, and art are built.