A restorative residency in Yangshuo

I was lucky enough to spend a month in China to round out the year's end for 2025 as a guest of Sun Yat-Sen University Centre for English-Language Creative Writing. The four-week Sun Yat-sen University Writers' Residency, organised by Professor Fan Dai of the School of International Studies, included working with translation students to improve the Chinese translation drafts of the my novella Instructions for a Steep Decline (which won the Grffith Review Novella Prize in 2019). After completing three weeks of writing in the beautiful mountain setting of Yangshuo, my fellow resident (the Spanish writer Cristina Sánchez-Andrade, an associate professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the Complutense University) and I delivered lectures on the Zhuhai campus of Sun Yat-Sen University. It was an extraordinary and enriching trip and I made some wonderful friends. I returned home with a renewed respect for and interest in China, its language and its people, as well as for the art of literary translation. I also made new and substantial progress on my latest nonfiction manuscript. I'm grateful, as always, for the opportunities granted me in my work in the creative writing field, especially the way a well-supported international residency like this one can enable deep creative exploration, away from the usual daily routines, at the same time as fostering new connections.

The beautiful Yangshuo region in southern China, known for its karst mountain landscape.