Cheney Creative Fellows
We are delighted to welcome two new Cheney Creative Fellows to our Centre. Fellowships are made possible due to a generous donation to made by Bacteriology and Biochemistry graduate Peter Cheney and his wife Susan to the University of Leeds.
The bilingual author Yan Ge 颜歌 has been awarded a fellowship from September 2025 to March 2027. During this time Yan Ge will spend between one and two months in residency with us in Leeds.
Yan Ge is an outstanding, multi-award-winning author who is not only well-established in China for her Chinese language fiction and short stories, but is simultaneously recognised for the success of the English translations of her work and for her English language fiction and prose. For someone who has just turned 40, this is an exceptional achievement.
Yan Ge won various national awards in her early twenties. In 2012 she was chosen as Best New Writer by the prestigious Chinese Literature Media Prize. Initially recognised for her writing for Young Adults, her later work addresses broader themes and continues to receive the highest accolades in Chinese literary circles, despite the fact she has been based in the UK for the last decade. Her latest book in Chinese is called 平乐县志 (Pingle and the County Annuals) (2023) and has been selected as the top 5 or 10 books of the year in seven separate independent Chinese rankings. In the same year she was also honoured as Young Writer of the Year by the prestigious One Way Street Awards. She has been awarded fellowships in Hong Kong, New Hampshire and Beijing.
After a stint as a visiting scholar at Duke University, she moved to Ireland in 2015 and then to England to take an MFA in Creative Writing in Norwich. Jeremy Tiang’s English translation of her novel Strange Beasts of China, was one of the New York Times Notable Books of 2021. Her 2023 English language debut collection of short stories, Elsewhere, was selected as a New Yorker Book of the Year. Her English writing has been recognised and anthologised, and she has been invited to join the judging panel for the International Dublin Literary Award (among many other judging roles she has accepted).
The poet, editor and academic Dr Tammy Lai-ming Ho is co-hosted between our Centre and Poetry@Leeds. Tammy's fellowship runs from November 2025 until May 2027.
Tammy Lai-Ming Ho is one of Hong Kong’s leading anglophone poets, and is also an active researcher in this field.
She is editor-in-chief of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and a founding co-editor of Hong Kong Studies, the English editor of Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, and the translation editor of The Shanghai Literary Review. Her own poetry collections include Hula Hooping (2015), winner of the Hong Kong Arts Development Council’s Young Artist Award, and If I Do Not Reply (2024). To date, her work has been translated into and published in Chinese, Filipino, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Macedonian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Vietnamese (x2) (x3), while her translations of other writers can be found in Chinese Literature Today, Drunken Boat, Pathlight, World Literature Today, among other places, and published by the Chinese University Press.
As well as her creative work, Dr Ho is an active researcher, and until 2022 was tenured Associate Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, where she taught fiction and poetics. Her BA and Masters were from Hong Kong University and her PhD, which she published as a monograph entitled Neo-Victorian Cannibalism Neo-Victorian Cannibalism: A Theory of Contemporary Adaptations (2019), is from Kings College London.
She is a poet and researcher of international renown. She has held residencies at the University of Iowa, the Käte Hamburger Centre for Cultural Practices of Reparation, and the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Formerly a tenured associate professor in Hong Kong, she is an Honorary Researcher at the Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library, University of Toronto, and lives in Europe.