In Yan Ge’s Elsewhere, ‘almost every story is a reverberating silent scream for home’

Fiction

Literary sensation Yan Ge. Photo: Joanna Millington

Anne Cunningham

Yan Ge has been a literary sensation in her native China since the age of 17, when she won a short story competition which resulted in an avalanche of offers from publishers. She has won just about every literary prize in her homeland, which she left in 2011 as a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature, headed for Duke University. She married an Irishman and lived here for some years before settling in the UK.

Elsewhere, her first to be written in English, marks her as equally capable in her adopted language. These stories are simultaneously exotic and familiar, a rare feat for anyone in any language.