Sheung-King is a pen name for an author who was born in Vancouver but raised in Hong Kong. He lived and taught at the post-secondary level in Guelph and Toronto and now divides his time between Canada and China. 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 studied for a Master of Design, Strategic Foresight and Innovation at OCAD University in Toronto. His short stories have been published in numerous literary magazines.
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)
Ma misses the sun, warmth and colors of their faraway homeland, but her daughter sees magic in everything — the clouds in the winter sky, the “firework” display when she throws an armful of snow into the air, making snow angels, tasting snowflakes. And in the end, her joy is contagious. Home is where family is, after all.
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)
Fiction
Batshit Seven: A Novel
Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2024.
forthcoming
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
From Governor General’s Award-nominated author Sheung-King comes a novel about a millennial living through the Hong Kong protests, as he struggles to make sense of modern life and the parts of himself that just won’t gel.
…
Inventive and utterly irresistible, with QR codes woven throughout, Sheung-King’s ingenious novel encapsulates the anxieties and apathies of the millennial experience. Batshit Seven is an ode to a beloved city, an indictment of the cycles of imperialism, and a reminder of the beautiful things left under the hype of commodified living.
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.