Min
Jia
Min Jia is an artist and writer. Through paintings and short stories, they approach narratives of migration and adaptation through a surreal, metamorphic lens. Their short story “The Sky in The Well” is included in The New Normal on the Margins, a digital anthology published by Wave Art Collective. They were a 2021 Wave Art Writing Fellow and a mentee through the ECW Press BIPOC Writers Mentorship Program. Born in Ürümqi, China, they now divide their time between Berlin, Germany and Toronto.
Program History
Citation
“I love the ambition, the strangeness, the go-for-brokenness of Min Jia’s novel-in-vignettes, which opens with a girl’s parents working abroad and buying her a gift to salve their absence. It’s a mechanical tail, what every kid wants! Jia uses amazing invention, skill, and deadpan humour to word what feels beyond words and apocalyptic to endure: a family irreversibly refigured by economic migration. Whimsy inflates this project, yet it never loses its stark and sobering emotional truths: magic! I’m so eager to work with this writer so that the world may have this novel as soon as possible.”