Bright Fear

Following her Costa Poetry Award-winning debut, Flèche (2019), comes Mary Jean Chan's second collection: Bright Fear. These poems further explore the distinctively intertwined themes of identity, language and postcolonial legacy. They are bedded in key moments from Chan's childhood in Hong Kong and her life, 'racialised and queer', in the UK. Questions of acceptance and assimilation are examined, whether in a mother's ambivalence or the specious jargon of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. The experience of living through a SARS outbreak with a father as a doctor is horribly revivified as, once again, the existential threat of pandemic becomes reality. Throughout, Chan offers new ways for us to 'withstand the quotidian tug-of-war / between brightness, terror and love'.

Mary Jean Chan is the author of Flèche (Faber, 2019), which won the Costa Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, the Jhalak Prize, the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award. An Italian translation of Flèche by Giorgia Sensi was published by Interno Poesia in 2023. Chan co-edited the acclaimed anthology 100 Queer Poems (Vintage, 2022) with Andrew McMillan. Bright Fear (Faber, 2023), Chan's second collection, is a Poetry Book Society Autumn Recommendation and was shortlisted for the 2023 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Chan is the 2023-24 Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at the University of Cambridge and served as a judge for the 2023 Booker Prize. Born and raised in Hong Kong, Chan lives in Oxford.