Fiona Sze-Lorrain

Praised in The New York Times Book Review as "nimble, evocative," it is set in Shanghai, Beijing, Singapore, Paris, and New York, following a cast of Asian women from 1946 to 2016.

It is longlisted for the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

Sze-Lorrain practices calligraphy and ink.

Fiona Sze-Lorrain (born 1980) is a French writer, musician, poet, literary translator, and editor.

Born in Singapore, Sze-Lorrain grew up trilingual and has lived mostly in Paris and New York City.

She spent her childhood in a hybrid of cultures, and her formative years in the United States and France.

She began studying classical piano and guzheng at a young age.

A graduate of Columbia University, she obtained her master's degree from New York University and attended the École Normale de Musique de Paris before earning a PhD in French from the Paris-Sorbonne University.

Sze-Lorrain's work involves fiction, poetry, translation, music, theater, and the visual arts.

She writes mainly in English, and translates from Chinese and French.

She also works with Spanish, Italian, and Japanese.

She has written for venues related to fashion journalism, music and art criticism, and dramaturgy.

In 2007, Sze-Lorrain worked with Gao Xingjian on a book of photography, essays, and poetry based on his film Silhouette/Shadow.

Through Mark Strand, whose works she would later translate into French, she found her poetic vocation, crediting him for having introduced her to poetry.

She is a co-founder of Cerise Press (2009–13), a corresponding editor of Mānoa (2012–14), and an editor at Vif Éditions.

The recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, Ledig House, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, she is the inaugural writer-in-residence at MALBA in Buenos Aires.

She has also been a visiting poet at various colleges and universities in United States and Europe.

Sze-Lorrain's debut poetry collection, Water the Moon, appeared in 2010, followed by My Funeral Gondola in 2013.

Her third collection, The Ruined Elegance, was published by Princeton University Press in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets in 2016 and was named one of Library Journal's Best Books in Poetry for 2015.

It was also a finalist for the 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Her poems and translations, handwritten in ink, were exhibited alongside ink drawings by Fritz Horstman from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in the art show, A Blue Dark, at The Institute Library (New Haven) in 2019.

The Rumpus said of her writing that it "serves as a vital midwife for the greater global understanding that will one day be born from today’s contracting and relaxing tensions between differing religions, cultures, and languages."

Prairie Schooner describes her work as an "arc" that "navigates the sense of otherness" with poems that "burst at the seams with the customs, gastronomy, ancestry, literature, and art of the two cultures."

Publishers Weekly calls her novel in stories "graceful" and "this author is one to watch" as she "effortlessly evokes the spirit of each setting" and "imbues her characters with haunting melancholy."

Mekong Review wrote that her fiction "resonates with a rich and efficient prosody. The narrative structure is creative, with each story placing an increasingly complete puzzle on top of the last."

Sze-Lorrain is a translator of contemporary American, French, and Chinese poetry.

She is a 2019-20 Abigail R. Cohen Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination.

As a classical zheng harpist, Sze-Lorrain has performed worldwide.

She has served as a festival and competition judge.

Sze-Lorrain lives in Paris with her husband Philippe Lorrain, former art director, independent publisher.

Film

Published during the COVID-19 pandemic, her fourth collection Rain in Plural (Princeton University Press, 2020) contains many "poems that resonate with a political undertone, and they often suggest in the midst of great threats we persist and continue our important work, aware we alone are not the only or even the most vulnerable. The poems care about the larger world and our current crises."

In response to the pandemic in Paris, Sze-Lorrain wrote a setting of new poems The Year of the Rat, set to music by Peter Child for unaccompanied voices, and virtually premiered in February 2021 by the solo artists of the Cantata Singers and Ensemble in Boston.

In 2023, Scribner published Sze-Lorrain's novel in stories Dear Chrysanthemums.

Her work was shortlisted for the 2020 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry and the 2016 Best Translated Book Award, and longlisted for the 2014 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.

She serves on the committee of the Translators Association of the Society of Authors in the UK.