Alec Ash

Alec Ash is a writer and editor living in China. He is the author of China’s New Youth (UK edition titled Wish Lanterns), literary nonfiction following the lives of six young Chinese, which was a BBC Book of the Week.

Ash’s longform articles have appeared in NYRB, LARB, the Guardian, 1843, and Dissent among elsewhere, as well as his China correspondence for The Sunday Times. He is Managing Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books China Channel.

Born in Oxford, UK, Ash studied English literature at Oxford University, where he edited The Isis magazine and hitchhiked to Morocco. On graduating, he taught in a Tibetan mountain village in western China, before moving to Beijing in 2008 to learn Mandarin, returning in 2012 to write. His work has appeared in the anthologies Chinese Characters (UC Press, 2012) and While We’re Here (Earnshaw Books, 2015), co-editing the latter from his old website the Anthill. He is also Asia Editor at Five Books, where he has interviewed over sixty authors about their literary influences.

• WildChina Book Club: China’s New Youth with Alec Ash

• Website: https://alecash.net/