Sheung-King was born in Vancouver but raised in Hong Kong. He now lives in Toronto and works as a writer and post-secondary educator. His undergraduate degree from Queen’s University is in Film and Media Studies. He completed an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph and is in the process of completing a Master of Design, Strategic Foresight and Innovation at OCAD University in Toronto. His short stories have been published in numerous literary magazines. He is at work on a collection of short stories.
Fiction
You Are Eating an Orange. You are Naked.
[Toronto]: Book*Hug Press, 2020.
E-book (Access restricted to members of the TMU community)
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
A young translator living in Toronto frequently travels abroad—to Hong Kong, Macau, Prague, Tokyo—often with his unnamed lover. In restaurants and hotel rooms, the couple begin telling folk tales to each other, perhaps as a way to fill the undefined space between them. Theirs is a comic and enigmatic relationship in which emotions are often muted and sometimes masked by verbal play and philosophical questions, and further complicated by the woman’s frequent unexplained disappearances.
You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked. is an intimate novel of memory and longing that challenges Western tropes and Orientalism. Embracing the playful surrealism of Haruki Murakami and the atmospheric narratives of filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, Sheung-King’s debut is at once lyrical and punctuated, and wholly unique, and marks the arrival of a bold new voice in Canadian literature.
Awards and Honours
2021 Amazon Canada First Novel Award (Finalist)
2021 Governor General’s Literary Award, Fiction, English language (Finalist)
Anthology (Short story)
The Spirits Have Nothing to Do With Us
Sheung-King. “July Has Nothing to Do with Gods.” In The Spirits Have Nothing to Do with Us: New Chinese Canadian Fiction, edited by Dan K. Woo. Hamilton: Buckrider Books, 2023, 127-135.