Timothy Mo

Timothy Mo (born December 30, 1950, Hong Kong) is an Anglo-Chinese writer whose critically acclaimed novels explore the intersection of English and Cantonese cultures.

Born to an English mother and a Chinese father, Mo lived in Hong Kong until age 10, when he moved to Britain. He was educated at the University of Oxford, after which he became a journalist and reviewer for the Times Educational Supplement and the New Statesman, as well as a contributor to London’s Boxing News; he himself had been a bantamweight boxer.

Mo’s first novel, The Monkey King (1978), is set in Hong Kong. Comic and ironic, it tells the story of Wallace Nolasco, a naive young Portuguese-Chinese in Hong Kong, who manages not only to gain control of his father-in-law’s business but eventually to head the family. Sour Sweet (1982), which won the Hawthornden Prize in 1982, deals with the immigrant experience in England, specifically with the racism encountered by a Chinese family when they open a restaurant in London.

The action of An Insular Possession (1986) occurs during the 19th-century Opium Wars. Another novel, The Redundancy of Courage (1991), is set in a troubled area (recognizable as East Timor) invaded by Indonesian forces and betrayed by Western powers. In 1994 Mo left his publisher, and the following year he self-published Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard, which details the mishaps of a number of delegates at an international ecological conference in the Philippines. Renegade or Halo2 (1999) centres on a migrant worker who travels the world, encountering numerous cultures. After an extended break, Mo returned in 2012 with Pure, about a transvestite film critic in Thailand who, in order to avoid prison following a drug arrest, returns home to spy on Islamic militants.