Honey Watson

Honey Barbara Watson (born 1994) is an English author and translator of literature from Mandarin to English. Her debut science fiction novel Lessons in Birdwatching was published in 2023. She joined video game studio ZA/UM as a writer for Zero Parades: For Dead Spies.

Early life and education Watson is from Yorkshire and attended Wakefield Girls' High School. She graduated with a first in History from University College London (UCL). She then pursued the Master's programme at Yenching Academy, a graduate college of Peking University, in Beijing. She states she did not speak a word of Chinese before arriving in Beijing.

After reading the assigned reading, Lu Xun's Diary of a Madman, Watson insisted on changing majors to Chinese literature, and began the process of self-teaching herself to translate literature.

Career

Chinese novelist Su Tong gave a month-long series of lectures at NYU, which Watson assisted by providing English language translations of his discussed stories throughout. This would lead to Watson translating a short story collection of Tong's called Midnight Stories: A short story collection from the mind behind Raise the Red Lantern. She would write from dive bars in Las Vegas.

Watson's first novel-length translation was Fan Wu's Souls Left Behind: A WW1 Chinese Labour Corps Novel.