Timothy Mo

Timothy Peter Mo ( Chinese 毛翔青 ; born December 30, 1950 in Hong Kong ) is a Chinese - British writer who was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for his novel Sour Sweet 1982 .

Life

Timothy Mo, son of a father from Guangdong and an English mother, studied at St John's College at the University of Oxford after completing school in Hong Kong and England and then worked as a journalist for the weekly newspaper New Statesman and the Boxing News .

He made his literary debut in 1978 with the Hong Kong novel The Monkey King , which was awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. In the 1980s , alongside Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro, he became one of the leading British writers on bi-cultural diversity, reflecting on both his own Anglo-Chinese ancestry and concerns about the consequences of imperialism and colonialism in Southeast Asia .

His three subsequent novels were all nominated for the Booker Prize : For Sour Sweet (1982), the story of a Chinese immigrant family living in London , he received the Hawthornden Prize. 1988 followed a cinematic adaptation of the story by a writer of Ian McEwan . The novel An Insular Posession (1986) was set in the first half of the 19th century during the First Opium War between Great Britain and the Empire of China . The 1991 novel The Redundancy of Courage is about the annexation of East Timor by Indonesia in 1976.

He recently published two other novels set in the Philippines : Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard (1995) is set during a scientific conference and is a satirical representation of cultural and imperial supremacy, while the 1999 Rooman Renegade or Halo2 describes the adventures of Rey Archimedes Blondel Castro , that of a US GI and a Filipino bar girl. For Renegade or Halo2 he was honored with the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1999.

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personal data
SURNAME	Mo, Timothy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Mo, Timothy Peter (full name); 毛翔青 (Chinese)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Sino-British writer
DATE OF BIRTH	December 30, 1950
PLACE OF BIRTH	Hong Kong