An Yu

An Yu grew up in Beijing and spent parts of her life studying and working in New York and Paris. She received her M.F.A. from New York University, during which she wrote her first novel, BRAISED PORK. Her short stories were finalists for the Short-Story Award For New Writers from Glimmer Train and the Annual Contest from Dogwood Journal. Apart from writing, she is the co-founder of YU, a jade jewellery brand based in Hong Kong.

BRAISED PORK was published in January 2020 by Harvill Secker in the UK, and in April 2020 by Grove Atlantic in the US. 

An Yu's second novel, GHOST MUSIC, is forthcoming from Harvill Secker and Grove Atlantic in 2022. 

Praise for BRAISED PORK (2020)

*A Stylist Best Book of 2020*

'Yu's prose is crisp and never tedious, with bursts of startling imagery amid the otherwise restrained style [...] The book is most enthralling when it juxtaposes the ancient and the aggressively modern (there are bronze dragons and Buddha wall paintings alongside Burberry hair clips, slick shopping malls), carefully weaving the disjointed, contradictory parts of Chinese society, like how sacred deities can be reduced to serving a New Age notion of karma.' Karen Cheung, The New York Times Book Review

'A startlingly original debut... [Braised Pork] is part domestic noir and part esoteric folk myth. It's also a story about a young woman finding her feet in modern metropolitan China. [...] Yu's prose is plain, but her novel is plotted so unpredictably that it accomplishes an almost accidental brilliance - she writes as though she is constantly changing her mind. [...] Yu makes Jia Jia a reserved but appealingly vulnerable heroine. There's something appealing, too, about Yu's peculiarly oblique vision: her sense of a world in which realism and surrealism can be superimposed. While it's easy to see that Braised Pork borrows something of Haruki Murakami's brand of strange melancholia, there's a startlingly original imagination of its own at work here. The merit of this book is how fluently it moves between metropolitan Beijing - with its unhappy marriages, hazy polluted air and expensive property market - and a stranger, more hallucinogenic realm of Tibetan myth and folk culture. Neither is more truthful than the other. Rather, together they evoke something of Jia Jia's discombobulated experience of modern Chinese life. Yu stages her agitated psychological state in some magnificently dreamlike set pieces... [Braised Pork] is a sensitive portrait of alienated young womanhood as it is set free from the suffocating constraints of marriage and comes up for air.' Shahidha Bari, Guardian

'Wild and distinctive... this rich and strange debut [is] a bizarre psychological odyssey. [...] Poised between silliness and high seriousness, contrasting narrative wildness with cool prose, the novel ignores the conventional advice "tell a dream, lose a reader". [...] [A] debut that gets under your skin rather than leaving you cold.' Anthony Cummins, Guardian 'Book of the Day'

'Reading [Braised Pork], you experience the feeling of slowly lowering your body into a dark pool, letting the water rise: now to your shoulders, now to your chin, now — ceasing to breathe — to the bridge of your nose. [...] This is a haunting, coolly written novel: deeply psychological but utterly lacking in theory or jargon. Yu’s sentences are unadorned, neither lyrical nor terse. Many are awkward, but this didn’t detract from the book’s appeal for me; if anything, I appreciated the rare refusal to mimic the looping sentences of lyrical prose stylists. [...] The novel is also intensely atmospheric. Certain settings remain in my head like filmic images: the crowded confines of Jia Jia’s childhood home, with its glowing aquarium; the sleek, modern lines of her lonely apartment; Leo’s bar, with its candlelit glow and high ceilings.' Piper French, LA Review of Books

'An engrossing portrait of isolation... [The] first pages of An Yu's eerie debut novel, Braised Pork, sound like the beginning of a domestic thriller... [but it transforms] into an original and electric narrative - one that doesn't fit neatly into any genre. [...] Another author might have chosen to follow a young widow on a journey of finding love after loss. But 28-year-old Yu, who was born and raised in Beijing, smartly decides not to. [...] There are some images that make us so uncomfortable, it’s impossible to look away from them. For Jia Jia, it’s initially the fish-man, but then she gets stuck on more memories of the past, which interrupt her present. In Braised Pork, Yu raises provocative questions about why we get fixated on those moments—and how they might relate to the company we crave.' Annabel Gutterman, TIME

‘What a voice An Yu unfurls in Braised Pork. So elegant and poised, so tuned to the great mysteries of love and loss. Like a breeze on a still day, hers is a sound I didn't know I needed until I felt it. Braised Pork is a major debut’ John Freeman

'An Yu writes beautifully about loneliness, the experience of isolation, and the possibility of human connection, however fragile. Braised Pork is mesmerising' Rosie Price, author of What Red Was