Ho Sok Fong | Granta

Ho Sok Fong

Ho Sok Fong is the Malaysian author of two award-winning short story collections in Chinese, Maze Carpet and Lake Like a Mirror. She is currently working on a novel, The Forest in Full Bloom, supported by a Taiwan National Culture and Arts Foundation grant. In the summer of 2020 she moved from Malaysia to Taipei, where she teaches at Taipei National University of the Arts.

Publications

Lake Like a Mirror

Ho Sok Fong

Translated by Natascha Bruce

By an author described by critics as ‘the most accomplished Malaysian writer, full stop’. Lake Like a Mirror is a scintillating exploration of the lives of women buffeted by powers beyond their control. Squeezing themselves between the gaps of rabid urbanisation, patriarchal structures and a theocratic government, these women find their lives twisted in disturbing ways.

In precise and disquieting prose, Ho Sok Fong draws her readers into a richly atmospheric world of naked sleepwalkers in a rehabilitation centre for wayward Muslims, mysterious wooden boxes, gossip in unlicensed hairdressers, hotels with amnesiac guests, and poetry classes with accidentally charged politics – a world that is peopled with the ghosts of unsaid words, unmanaged desires and uncertain statuses, surreal and utterly true.