Kim Fu is a graduate of the University of British Columbia’s MFA in creative writing. Her parents immigrated to Canada from Hong Kong. She now lives in Seattle, Washington. Fu’s poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in a many Canadian literary magazines. Her first story collection, Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, will be published by Coach House Books in 2022.
Fiction
For Today I Am a Boy
Toronto: HarperCollins, 2014.
PS8611 .U14 F67 2014
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
At birth, Peter Huang is given the Chinese name juan chaun, meaning powerful king. He is the exalted only son in a family of daughters, the one who will finally fulfill his father’s dreams of Western masculinity. But Peter has different dreams: he knows that he is a girl.
Peter and his sisters—elegant Adele, shrewd Helen and Bonnie the bon vivant—grow up in a house of many secrets, then escape the confines of small-town Ontario and spread from Montreal to California to Berlin. Peter’s own journey is obstructed by playground bullies, masochistic lovers, Christian ex-gays and the ever-present shadow of his father.
Sensitive, witty and stunningly assured, Kim Fu’s debut novel is a coming-of-age tale like no other, one that lays bare the costs of forsaking one’s own path in deference to a road mapped out by others. Both lyrical and unflinching, For Today I Am a Boy shows us an unforgettable struggle: the story of a woman in the body of a Chinese-Canadian man— and marks the emergence of an astonishing new Canadian literary voice.
Awards and Honours
2015 Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction (Winner)
2015 Lambda Literary Award–Transgender Fiction (Finalist)
2015 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction (Finalist)
Fiction (Short stories)
Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century
Toronto: Coach House Books, 2022.
Forthcoming Feb. 2022
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
In the twelve unforgettable tales of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, the strange is made familiar and the familiar strange, such that a girl growing wings on her legs feels like an ordinary rite of passage, while a bug-infested house becomes an impossible, Kafkaesque nightmare. Each story builds a new world all its own: a group of children steal a haunted doll; a runaway bride encounters a sea monster; a vendor sells toy boxes that seemingly control the passage of time; an insomniac is seduced by the Sandman. These visions of modern life wrestle with themes of death and technological consequence, guilt and sexuality, as they unmask the contradictions that exist within all of us.
Fiction
The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore
Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2018.
PS8611 .U14 L67 2018
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
A group of young girls descends on Camp Forevermore, a sleepaway camp in the Pacific Northwest, where their days are filled with swimming lessons, friendship bracelets and camp songs by the fire. Bursting with excitement and nervous energy, they set off on an overnight kayaking trip to a nearby island. But before the night is over, they find themselves stranded, with no adults to help them survive or guide them home.
The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore follows these five girls—Nita, Kayla, Isabel, Dina and Siobhan—through and beyond this fateful trip. We see the survivors through the successes and failures, loves and heartbreaks of their teen and adult years, and we come to understand how a tragedy can alter the lives it touches in innumerable ways. In diamond-sharp prose, Kim Fu gives us a portrait of friendship and of the families we build for ourselves—and the pasts we can’t escape.
Awards and Honours
2019 Washington State Book Award–Fiction (Finalist)
Poetry
How Festive the Ambulance
Gibsons, BC: Nightwood Editions, 2016
PS8611 .U14 H69 2016
Publisher’s Synopsis
In this debut poetry collection by award-winning author Kim Fu, incantations, mythical creatures and extreme violence illuminate small scenes of domestic life and the banal tragedies of modern love and modern death. A sharp edge of humour slices through Fu’s poetry, drawing attention to the distance between contemporary existence and the basic facts of life. Alternating between incisive wit and dark beauty, Fu brings the rich symbolism of fairy tales to bear on our image-obsessed age. These poems are utterly of-the-moment, capturing the rage, irony and isolation of the era we live in.
Anthology (Short story)
AlliterAsian
Fu, Kim. “Mercury, Messenger of the Gods.” In AlliterAsian: Twenty Years of Ricepaper Magazine, edited by Julia Lin, Allan Cho, and Jim Wong-Chu. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2015, 145-157.
First published in Ricepaper 18, no. 1 (2013)
Links
Kim Fu’s personal website
Publisher Arsenal Pulp Press
Publisher Coach House Books
Publisher HarperCollins Canada
Amnesty International book club discussion of For Today I Am a Boy