Fiona Sze-Lorrain

Fiona Sze-Lorrain (born 1980) is a French writer, poet, literary translator, editor, and musician. She writes in English and translates from Chinese and French. Her fiction, poetry, and translations have received recognition, shortlisted and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Best Translated Book Award, and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, among others. She has performed widely as a zheng harpist. Alongside her literary and artistic work, she is involved in negotiation, mediation, and conflict resolution. She is a judge for the 2025 International Dublin Literary Award and the inaugural John Calder Translation Prize.

Early life and education A French citizen born in Singapore, Sze-Lorrain grew up trilingual and has lived mostly in Paris and New York City. She spent her childhood in a hybrid of cultures and her formative years in the United States and France. She began studying classical piano and guzheng at a young age. A graduate of Columbia University, she obtained her master's degree from New York University and attended the École Normale de Musique de Paris before earning a PhD in French from the Paris-Sorbonne University.

Work Sze-Lorrain's work involves fiction, poetry, translation, music, theater, and the visual arts. She writes mainly in English and translates from Chinese and French. She also works with Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. She has written for venues related to fashion journalism, music and art criticism, and dramaturgy.

In 2007, Sze-Lorrain worked with Gao Xingjian on a book of photography, essays, and poetry based on his film Silhouette/Shadow.

Through Mark Strand, whose work she would later translate into French, she found her poetic vocation, crediting him for having introduced her to poetry. Sze-Lorrain's debut poetry collection, Water the Moon, appeared in 2010, followed by My Funeral Gondola in 2013. Her third collection, The Ruined Elegance, was published by Princeton University Press in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets in 2016 and was named one of Library Journal 's Best Books in Poetry for 2015. It was also a finalist for the 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Published during the COVID-19 pandemic, her fourth collection Rain in Plural (Princeton University Press, 2020) contains many "poems that resonate with a political undertone, and they often suggest in the midst of great threats we persist and continue our important work, aware we alone are not the only or even the most vulnerable. The poems care about the larger world and our current crises." Rain in Plural was a finalist for the 2021 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry.

In response to the pandemic in Paris, Sze-Lorrain wrote a setting of new poems The Year of the Rat, set to music by Peter Child for unaccompanied voices, and virtually premiered in February 2021 by the solo artists of the Cantata Singers and Ensemble in Boston. Child collaborated with Sze-Lorrain again for her poem "Untouchable" in his song cycle A Golden Apple: Six Poems of Intimacy and Loss (2023), premiered by Tony Arnold at MIT.

In 2023, Scribner published Fiona Sze-Lorrain's novel in stories Dear Chrysanthemums. Set in Shanghai, Beijing, Singapore, Paris, and New York, following a cast of Asian women from 1946 to 2016, the critically acclaimed work of fiction "illuminates Asian women’s resilience across decades of personal, political, and economic upheaval." These "women’s stories weave together in understated and inventive ways" while "the novel serves as "a multilayered meditation on intergenerational trauma, memory, and resilience." Dear Chrysanthemums has been longlisted for the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

Sze-Lorrain practices Japanese and Chinese calligraphy and ink work. Her poems and translations, handwritten in ink, were exhibited alongside ink drawings by Fritz Horstman from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in the art show, A Blue Dark, at The Institute Library (New Haven) in 2019.

Critical response

The New York Times Book Review praises her stories as "nimble, evocative."

Prairie Schooner describes her work as an "arc" that "navigates the sense of otherness" with poems that "burst at the seams with the customs, gastronomy, ancestry, literature, and art of the two cultures."

Publishers Weekly calls her novel in stories "graceful" and "this author is one to watch" as she "effortlessly evokes the spirit of each setting" and "imbues her characters with haunting melancholy."

Mekong Review writes that her fiction "resonates with a rich and efficient prosody. The narrative structure is creative, with each story placing an increasingly complete puzzle on top of the last."

The Washington Post describes her translation as "lyrical."

Translation

Sze-Lorrain is a translator of contemporary American, French, and Chinese poetry and prose. She is named the most prolific translator in modern and contemporary Chinese poetry. Her translations were shortlisted for the 2020 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry and the 2016 Best Translated Book Award, and longlisted for the 2014 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She serves on the committee of the Translators Association of the Society of Authors in the UK.

Editor

She is a cofounder of Cerise Press (2009–13), a corresponding editor of Mānoa (2012–14), and an editor at Vif Éditions.

Residencies and fellowships

The recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, Ledig House, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, among others, she is the inaugural writer-in-residence at MALBA in Buenos Aires. She has also been a visiting poet at various colleges and universities in United States and Europe. She is a 2019-20 Abigail R. Cohen Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination.

Music

As a classical zheng harpist, Sze-Lorrain has performed worldwide since 2003. Her concert venues include Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Merkin Hall, World Music Hall of Wesleyan, Maison des cultures du monde, UNESCO, among numerous others. She has served as a festival and competition judge.

Sze-Lorrain adapted and arranged (for zheng’s duet with erhu) Shigeru Umebayashi’s theme music of Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love.

Personal life Sze-Lorrain lives in Paris with her husband Philippe Lorrain, cofounder of the French magazine Interférences (1974–1982), art director and independent publisher.

Publications

Fiction Dear Chrysanthemums, 2023.

Poetry Rain in Plural, 2020. The Ruined Elegance, 2016. Invisible Eye, 2015. My Funeral Gondola, 2013. Water the Moon, 2010.

Chapbook Not Meant as Poems, 2018.

Collaboration Untouchable in A Golden Apple: Six Poems of Intimacy and Loss (2023), set to music by Peter Child, premiered by Tony Arnold, 2023. The Year of the Rat, set to music by Peter Child, premiered by Amy Lieberman, Xiao Shi, Sheryl Krevsky Elkin, and Karyl Ryczek from the Cantata Singers and Ensemble, 2021. A Blue Dark with Fritz Horstman, 2019.

Translations Mirror: Selected Poems by Zhang Zao, 2025. Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm: Poems and Essays by Yu Xiuhua, 2021. Green Mountain by Yang Jian, 2020. Karma by Yin Lichuan, 2020. My Mountain Country by Ye Lijun, 2019. Trace by Yu Xiang, 2017. Sea Summit by Yi Lu, 2016. Chariots of Women by Amang, 2016. A Tree Planted in Summer by Ling Yu, 2015. Writing before Sleep by Na Ye, 2015. The City Is a Novel by photographer Alexey Titarenko, with essays by Gabriel Bauret, Sean Corcoran, and Brett Abbott, 2015. Canyon in the Body by Lan Lan, 2014. Nails by Lan Lan, 2013. I Can Almost See the Clouds of Dust by Yu Xiang, 2013. Wind Says by Bai Hua, 2012. To the One Who Writes Poetry Tonight by Yu Xiang, 2012. Presque invisible (Almost Invisible) by Mark Strand, 2012. Low Key by Yu Xiang, 2011. Mingus, méditations by Auxeméry, 2011 "Ghérasim Luca Portfolio" by Ghérasim Luca in Poetry International, 2010. "The Way of the Wandering Bird" by Gao Xingjian, with Ned Burgess, in Silhouette/Shadow: The Cinematic Art of Gao Xingjian, 2007.

Edited/Co-edited Starry Island: New Writing from Singapore, 2014. On Freedom: Spirit, Art, and State, 2013. Sky Lanterns: New Poetry from China, Formosa, and Beyond, 2012. Cerise Press: A Journal of Literature, Arts & Culture, Vol. 1 Issue 1-Vol. 5 Issue 13, 2009-2013. ISSN 1946-5262 Silhouette/Shadow: The Cinematic Art of Gao Xingjian, 2007. Interculturalism: Exploring Critical Issues, 2004.

CD Une seule prise (In One Take), 2010. UPC 3-760201-400005 Film Rain in Plural . . . and Beyond, 2021. Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination.

Awards and honors 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction Longlisted 2021 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry Finalist 2020 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry Finalist 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist 2016 Best Translated Book Award Finalist 2014 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation Longlisted 2014 New Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist 2011 Eric Hoffer Book Award Honorable Mention