| Kim Fu | |
| Birth Date: | 1987 |
| Birth Place: | Vancouver, British Columbia |
| Occupation: | novelist |
| Period: | 2010s-present |
| Nationality: | Canadian |
| Notableworks: | For Today I Am a Boy |
Kim Fu (born 1987) is a Canadian-born writer, living in Seattle, Washington. Born in Vancouver, British Columbia to immigrant parents from Hong Kong,[1] Fu studied creative writing at the University of British Columbia.
Her first novel For Today I Am a Boy was released in 2014. The book follows a Chinese Canadian transgender girl's realization of her identity through her adolescence adulthood.[2] It went on to win the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award.[3] It was also a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and long-listed for CBC's Canada Reads. Writing for the Harvard Review, A. Naomi Jackson said that it was "refreshing to read a novel that illustrates the harrowing choices transgender people face alongside hope."
Fu's debut poetry collection How Festive the Ambulance received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, which called it a "playful, lyrical, and cutting, debut poetry collection" with a "dizzying display of styles and scope."[4] It was also a 2017 National Magazine Awards Silver Medal winner and a Best Canadian Poetry 2016 selection. Spenser Smith, for Prairie Fire, wrote that it was a "sombre, engrossing read" and, regarding Fu's writing: "her bluntness holds a level of complexity and metaphor that makes each reread of a poem very rewarding."[5]
Her second novel, The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore, which follows the lives of young girls on a camping trip, was published in 2018.[6] Reviewing it for The New York Times, Lisa Ko said the book was "multilayered exploration of how class and culture inform the girls’ actions and alliances during the trip, and how the trip then affects their relationships and choices in adulthood."[7] In Shondaland, Nicole Chung interviewed Fu regarding her second novel, in which she said, of the novel's linked-story structure: "I think a lot of it was that I knew these characters were not easy-to-like people. They’re not the kind of characters you immediately understand and root for. So for each one, we needed to sit with them for a long time in order to know who they were."[8]
Her short story collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century was published in 2022.[9] Gabino Iglesias, writing for NPR, stated that it was "a wildly imaginative collection in which elements of science fiction, fantasy, and even crime fiction blend together."[10] Melissa Darcey Hall, writing for The Adroit Journal, compared Fu's take on horror to that of Carmen Maria Machado and Mariana Enríquez, stating that "one of Fu’s greatest strengths is her ability to turn horror on its head, focusing less on the terror the modern-day monsters incite, but what they reveal about ourselves."[11]
Fu's writing has appeared in Granta, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Hazlitt, and The Times Literary Supplement.[12] She has received residency fellowships from the Ucross Foundation, Berton House, Wildacres, and the Wallace Stegner Grant for the Arts.
| Title | Year Published | Publisher | ISBN | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| For Today I Am a Boy | 2014 | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| ||
| How Festive the Ambulance: Poems | 2016 | Nightwood Editions |
| ||
| The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore | 2018 | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt | |||
| Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century | 2022 | Tin House | Shortlisted for the 2022 Giller Prize[13] Winner of the 2023 Danuta Gleed Literary Award[14] |