Biography

Cheng Jiaoyang is an award-winning novelist and guest column host of Hong Kong Literature Magazine. She has published short story collections titled 《危險動物》 ("Dangerous Animals") and 《烏鴉在港島線起飛》("The Crow Takes Flight on the Island Line") ,and the former one has been collected by National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature, the Brooklyn Public Library in New York, and the National Library of Singapore. She has got Hong Kong Youth Literature Award, the "Urban Fiction Biennial" New Talent Award from "Guangzhou Literature and Art", and has been shortlisted for the Taiwan Times Literary Award. She has worked as a columnist for VICE China, strategist at Ogilvy, and part-time lecturer.

Current Work

I mainly write short stories. Most of them are absurd, magic realist, and sarcastic to reveal the social problems of Hong Kong as a metropolis. My works have been published in various literature platforms in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore since 2015. In 2017, I quit my job as a digital marketing specialist at a quite famous local advertising agency to become a full-time student at MALCS. The course related to Hong Kong culture and the art of storytelling I learned from MALCS further inspired my creative writing. In 2019, The Chinese version of my graduation work from MALCS, a piece titled 《紙皮龜宅》("Life in a Tortoise Shell"), was shortlisted for the Taiwan Times Literature Awards and has been included in my latest collection of short stories,《烏鴉在港島線起飛》("The Crow Takes Flight on the Island Line").

For me, studying at MALCS was like swimming in the sea of literature and cinema.

Experience at MALCS

For me, studying at MALCS was like swimming in the sea of literature and cinema. The fantastic teaching of the professors was like a diamond-like shimmer on the sea wave. I absorbed a lot of narrative skills by deeply learning the highlighted literary works and films from the professors. I especially enjoyed the progress of creating a story in English as my final project. How to tell a fascinating story to criticize the property hegemony and poverty of the elderly in Hong Kong? This was the topic of my thesis. The knowledge of surrealism and fantasy writing that I learned in the Hong Kong and Beyond course led me to find a perfect angle to start my story. I created a surreal house hidden in a turtle shell as a key metaphor throughout the story. Recently, this story has attracted the attention of film companies to acquire its drama adaptation rights.

Cheng Jiaoyang Cassie: Posted on Facebook and IG on Jul 30, 2024