Anna Ling
Kaye
Anna Ling Kaye is a freelance writer and editor. She has served as artistic editor at PRISM international and Ricepaper magazines, and guest editor at The New Quarterly Magazine. Her fiction won the 2021 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers - Short Fiction for "East City" and was shortlisted for the 2015 Writers' Trust McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize for "Red Egg and Ginger." A third-culture kid of mixed heritage, she is grateful to be living in Vancouver on the traditional and unceded homelands of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
Award History
Jury Citation
“In ‘East City,’ we are embedded alongside rural workers living displaced lives in a Chinese manufacturing metropolis. Anna Ling Kaye renders their world in crisp, efficient prose, guiding the protagonist, Lan Lan, as she finds work — and friendship — on the assembly line in a doll factory. Like the best fiction, this story is both attentive to its own specifics and filled with the universal shadows of human experience, gesturing outward at the stark reality of life for migrant workers around the world. ‘East City’ is a compassionate and electric story for these times.”
— 2021 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award short fiction jury (J.R. McConvey, Zalika Reid-Benta, and John Elizabeth Stintzi)
Selected Works
East City
Jury Citation
“In ‘Red Egg and Ginger,’ Anna Ling Kaye presents a family, a community, whole and complete. Mei is a character standing at a threshold, between worlds, communities, even countries. And while we never cross that threshold, Kaye’s precise use of language infuses every moment with the ambivalent agony of possibility.” — 2015 Journey Prize Jury (Anthony De Sa, Tanis Rideout, and Carrie Snyder)
