Paper Scissors Stone

by Kit Fan

Winner of the 2010 HKU Poetry Prize

"'Then all things began twice.' The poems in Paper Scissors Stone are moved by the forces of repetition and release, and are haunted by crossings (of borders, of people, of languages and their written characters). With wit and sorrow, precision and tact, the poems study the essential qualities of places, persons, and their arrangements, asking us what it is to begin twice. The book is a formally beautiful and complete meditation on transformation." -Saskia Hamilton

"These extraordinary poems, so assured in their directions, so startling in their clarities, have an eerily dreamlike wakefulness. Fan's enigmatic lucidity is born of a confluence of traditions, both real and imagined. This is not simply a remarkable debut, but a brilliantly accomplished book." -Adam Phillips

Born and educated in Hong Kong, Kit Fan now lives in the UK. His poems have been widely published in literary magazines. This award-winning first book of poems establishes him as one of the most promising new writers on the Hong Kong literary scene.

62 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 1, 2011

About the author

Kit Fan is a novelist, poet and critic. His first novel Diamond Hill (2021) was published with critical acclaim. Goodbye Chinatown (2026) is his second novel. His third poetry collection, The Ink Cloud Reader (2023), was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and Forward Prize. He was shortlisted twice for the Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize, and was a winner of the Hong Kong University International Poetry Prize, Northern Writers Awards for Poetry and Fiction, Times/Stephen Spender Poetry Translation Prize and POETRY’s Editors Prize for Reviewing. He has written for the Guardian, Times Literary Supplement and Telegraph. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Vice-Chair of Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS), Co-Chair of the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA), and a Trustee of New Writing North. He was born and educated in Hong Kong and now lives in the UK.