Alice Poon

From the author: I was born, grew up and spent a portion of my adult years in Hong Kong. As I stumbled from childhood to adulthood, the city grew in prosperity, albeit at a significant social cost.

When I was in Form 4 in high school, my English teacher Ms. da Silva one day came into the classroom and read out a particular piece of creative composition to the whole class. It was a descriptive passage about a tiger being shot with an arrow in a dense forest, and it was my work. From that day onward, I’ve been carrying this dream of becoming a writer.

I am a semi-retiree living in British Columbia, Canada, trying belatedly to fulfill that dream of my youth.

Shifts of fortune in many Hong Kong people’s lives in the four decades leading up to the change of sovereignty fascinate me and have inspired me to write my debut novel, “Fated and Fateless”. The story is told through two female characters’ contrasting life journeys in the colonial days.

Extensive work experiences in Hong Kong’s property development industry taught me many life lessons and also opened my eyes to insidious social problems. Such experiences plus my own observation and research led me to write the non-fiction title “Land and the Ruling Class in Hong Kong” in late 2003 and to self-publish it in late 2005. The book was featured as Editor’s Choice: Scholarly in the 2007 Canadian Book Review Annual. When this book was translated and published in Chinese in 2010, it became a huge bestseller in Hong Kong and the Mainland, following which a second English edition was published and promoted overseas. The Chinese edition also won the 4th Hong Kong Book Prize in June 2011. Frankly, readers’ enthused reaction was as much a humbling experience for me as the prize winning.

Lately I have been enamored with novels by 19th century French realist and naturalist writers. I plan on writing historic novels set in Hong Kong and/or Greater China.