Justin Hill, an English writer born in the Bahamas, is the author of five books, including the novel Shieldwall, published earlier this year. His first book, A Bend in the Yellow River, is a portrait of small-town China. His first novel, The Drink and Dream Teahouse, is set in contemporary China and won the 2003 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. His second novel, Passing Under Heaven, tells the life of Chinese poet Yu Xuanji, who lived in the final years of the Tang Dynasty. The novel was awarded the 2005 Somerset Maugham Award. Mr Hill, who worked for seven years as a volunteer with the Voluntary Service Overseas in rural China and Africa, lives in Hong Kong and teaches creative writing at City University of Hong Kong.
“Ings Walks,” a poem you wrote in 2007, muses about the dreams of its subject in the following stanza: “It was never a long list:/ write a book, read, travel, be happy/ I look for awhile/ wonder how I am doing.” Does that fairly describe your own youthful dreams? And, if so, how are you doing now?
Yes, that’s a poem about walking along the river in York, and looking into my old school grounds. I like going back home and checking my present life against the things I used to imagine growing up would be. It was a short list, and I achieved the easy ones – writing a book and travelling – fairly early on. I’m still travelling, and when my first book was published, when I was 25, I realised that getting published was only the first challenge. The real challenge was to write better books, and now, six books in, I feel I’m starting to understand my craft. The real challenge, of course, is to be happy: and I’m lucky. Life is good.
Aside from writing books, you teach writing at City University of Hong Kong. What has teaching in Hong Kong taught you – about Hong Kong, about the development of the creative industries here in general?
I teach both undergraduates and post-graduates in City University’s MFA in Creative Writing. Storytelling is probably as old as human speech, and I’m very impressed by the work that my students at City University have been producing. Once you get past the stereotypes of Hong Kong students, this is probably not surprising. Young people in Hong Kong are very plugged into the modern world, much of which involves arts and creativity: from social and visual media, to texting and blogging. Once we’ve worked on the basics of creative writing, and set up the right environment for students to write, then the stories flow.
What I find my students lack is exposure to literature, in all its many forms, and this is something I try and encourage. Writers should be readers as well.
Is the pervasiveness of social media among today’s youth changing the very nature and interests of the students you teach? Do they respond to writing, to literature, differently than you do?
I don’t think social media is changing storytelling particularly, it’s more about giving it a different outlet. But I do think storytelling is changing, in the sense that people want stories to happen faster than before. There’s much more pressure on a writer to write a page-turner than there was before, as bookshops move literary fiction to the back of the shop, and pile mass-market fiction up in the windows.
This is partly the influence of film, and partly the environment we live in now, where we have a lot more ways of spending our free time. If a book doesn’t grab you quickly, it’s more likely to be put down and not picked up again.
You are a writer, a teacher, a speaker. Do you look at what you do as a business and yourself as a business person as much as an artist?
I see myself entirely as a writer. But having said that, there are opportunities now for writers to go out and help sell their book. And because I want to go on writing great books, it’s important for me to make sure my books sell. The Internet has given geeks and nerds, like me, ways of congregating. So hobbies I used to do with a friend or two at home, there are now forums and websites and podcasts that bring those small groups together. It’s great to be able to reach these kinds of groups, and make sure they know about your book.
Your early writing focused largely on China, its culture and history, while your just-published novel, Shieldwall – the first in an English trilogy – is set in 11th century England. Are you effectively done with China, and Asia, as a writer?
No. But I did feel that all I had to say about China in the novel form, I said in The Drink and Dream Teahouse, and I don’t know how to better that, and am not the kind of writer who wants to write the same book twice.
I still write short stories about China, and ideas about Hong Kong are starting to coalesce in my mind. Timothy Mo famously said that Hong Kong is the graveyard of the English novelist, and I like a challenge.
You’re taking part in this year’s Hong Kong Book Fair and have participated in previous years. What do you think of the fair and its approach to books and to literature?
I’m constantly amazed by how big and how popular the Hong Kong Book Fair is: I don’t know another celebration of writing where people turn out in such numbers. I see the popularity as a testament to the power of the story and the written word, and the clear indication that stories and writing are important to people in Hong Kong.
