Timothy Mo

Photo: © Timothy Mo

Biography

Timothy Mo was born in Hong Kong in 1950 to a Cantonese father and an English mother. He was educated in Hong Kong and England. After graduating from St John's College, Oxford, he worked as a journalist for the New Statesman and Boxing News. With Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro, Timothy Mo emerged in the 1980s as one of the most important novelists writing about bi-cultural diversity, reflecting both his Anglo-Chinese background and his concerns for the effects of imperialism and colonial rule in South-East Asia.

His first novel, The Monkey King (1978), set in Hong Kong, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. His next three novels were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction: Sour Sweet (1982), the story of a Chinese immigrant family living in London, winner of the Hawthornden Prize; An Insular Possession (1986), set during the Opium Wars between Britain and China in the first half of the nineteenth century; and The Redundancy of Courage (1991), a fictional account of Indonesia's annexation of East Timor in 1976. Sour Sweet was adapted as a film in 1988 with a screenplay by Ian McEwan.

Mo has published his two most recent books himself. Both are set in the Philippines: Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard (1995), set during an academic conference, a satire of cultural and imperial domination, while Renegade or Halo2 (1999) describes the adventures of Rey Archimedes Blondel Castro, the son of an American G.I. and a Filipina bar-girl. Renegade or Halo2 was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction).