David T K Wong Fellowship for writers

The David T. K. Wong Fellowship is a unique and generous annual award of £26,000 to enable a fiction writer who wants to write in English about the Far East to spend a year in the UK, at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.

The Fellowship is named for its sponsor Mr. David Wong, a retired Hong Kong businessman, who has also been a teacher, journalist and senior civil servant, and is a writer of short stories himself. The Fellowship was launched in 1997 and the first Fellow appointed from 1st October 1998.

The Fellow joins a community of writers founded by Sir Angus Wilson and Sir Malcolm Bradbury in 1971.  Among our graduates are:  Tash Aw, Trezza Azzopardi, Martyn Bedford, John Boyne, Tracy Chevalier, Andrew Cowan, Diana Evans, Sue Fletcher, Kathryn Hughes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Toby Litt, Ian McEwan and Owen Sheers.

Previous David T.K. Wong Fellows: Po Wah Lam (1998), José Dalisay (1999), Simone Lazaroo (2000), Liisa Laing (2001), Wendy Law-Yone (2002), Lakambini Sitoy (2003), Rattawut Lapcharoensap (2004), Linh Dinh (2005), Mulaika Hijjas (2006), Balli Jaswal (2007), Nam Le (2008) and Hanh Hoang (2009).

Applications for the Fellowship will be considered from established published as well as unpublished writers of any age and any nationality. (Please visit the UK Border Agency Website at: https://visaguide.world/europe/uk-visa/employment/tier-5-temporary-worker/  in order to ensure that you are able to score the requisite number of points in order to apply for entry clearance. This only applies to individuals subject to a certificate of sponsorship currently living outside the UK.)

The Fellowship will be awarded to a writer planning to produce a work of prose fiction in English which deals seriously with some aspect of life in the Far East (Brunei, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Laos, Macau, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Peoples’ Republic of China, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam).

The successful candidate will be selected by a distinguished international panel. There will be no interviews, and candidates will be judged entirely on the quality and promise of their writing and the project they describe.