Timothy Mo

Timothy Mo
Born	Timothy Peter Mo (1950-12-30) 30 December 1950 (age 74)
Occupation	Novelist
Nationality	British
Period	1978–present
Genre	Fiction
Chinese name
Chinese	毛翔青[1]
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Máo Xiángqīng Yue: Cantonese Yale Romanization Mòuh Chèuhngchīng Jyutping Mou4 Coeng4-ching1

Timothy Peter Mo (born 30 December 1950^[2]) is a British Asian novelist. Born to a British mother and a Hong Kong father, Mo lived in Hong Kong until the age of 10, when he moved to Britain. Educated at Mill Hill School and St John's College, Oxford, Mo worked as a journalist before becoming a novelist.^[3]

His works have won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction), and three of his novels were shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction.^[4] Mo was also the recipient of the 1992 E. M. Forster Award.^[5] His novel An Insular Possession (1986) was among the contenders in The Telegraph's list of the 10 all-time greatest Asian novels.^[6]

In the early 1990s Mo became increasingly mistrustful of his publishers and increasingly outspoken about the publishing industry in general. Since 1994 when he rejected a £125,000 advance from Random House for his next novel, he has self-published his books under the label "Paddleless Press". His first novel to be self-published was Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard.^[7][8][9]

Background

Mo has been described as a British Asian author.^[10]

Novels

• The Monkey King (1978)
• Sour Sweet (1982), filmed as Soursweet in 1988
• An Insular Possession (1986)
• The Redundancy of Courage (1991)
• Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard (1995)
• Renegade or Halo2 (2000)
• Pure (2012)

Awards

• 1979: Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for The Monkey King^[4]
• 1982: Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) for Sour Sweet^[4]
• 1982: Hawthornden Prize for Sour Sweet^[4]
• 1986: Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) for An Insular Possession^[4]
• 1991: Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) for The Redundancy of Courage^[4]
• 1992: E. M. Forster Award^[5]
• 1999: James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) for Renegade or Halo2^[4]

References

1. "一個人一個故事：消失12年 Timothy Mo新作面世". Apple Daily. 19 December 2011. Retrieved 17 December 2015.^{[dead link‍]}
2. According to "Timothy Mo" in Contemporary Authors Online, Thomson Gale, (16 June 2004 update), some sources give his year of birth as 1953
3. Nick Rennison (2005). Contemporary British novelists. Routledge. pp. 101–3. ISBN 978-0-415-21709-5.
4. "Timothy Mo British Council Literature". British Council. British Council. Retrieved 14 January 2016.
5. "American Academy of Arts and Letters - Award Winners". American Academy of Arts and Letters. Archived from the original on 6 November 2011. Retrieved 9 July 2015.
6. "10 best Asian novels of all time". The Telegraph. 22 April 2014. Retrieved 6 December 2020.
7. Tonkin, Boyd (22 October 2011). "Timothy Mo - Postcards from the edge". The Independent. Retrieved 27 November 2015.
8. Foran, Charles (22 June 2012). "The rise and fall, and rise again, of the mysterious Timothy Mo". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 27 November 2015.
9. Books by ISBN Paddleless Press
10. Tamara S. Wagner (2008). "Gorged-out Cadavers of Hills". In Neil Murphy; Wai-Chew Sim (eds.). British Asian Fiction: Framing the Contemporary. Cambria Press. p. 165. ISBN 978-1604975413. British Asian authors like Timothy Mo or Kazuo Ishiguro.

External links

• Timothy Mo at British Council: Literature