Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Readalikes
Peter Ho Davies was born in 1966 to Welsh and Chinese parents. He has degrees
in Physics and English, and was awarded an MA in Creative Writing from Boston
University. He has worked in Malaysia, Singapore, and the USA, and was also, for
a time, UK business manager for Varsity.
His work has appeared in a variety of magazines and newspapers, and his short
fiction is widely anthologized, including selections for Prize Stories: The O.
Henry Awards 1998 and Best American Short Stories 1995, 1996 and 2001. His own
first published collection of short stories was The Ugliest House in the World
(1998), which contains tales set in Malaysia, South Africa and Patagonia. This
collection won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award and the Mail on Sunday/John
Llewellyn Rhys Prize. His second collection, Equal Love, was published in 2000.
Peter Ho Davies lives in the United States and directs the MFA Program in
Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. He is a recipient of fellowships
from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in
Provincetown. In 2003, he was named by Granta magazine as one of twenty 'Best of
Young British Novelists'.
Davies is married and has one son.
Peter Ho Davies's website
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Q: What inspired you to write The Welsh Girl?
A: One of my earliest memories of my grandmother’s house in North Wales is
playing with the small brass trinkets – a letter opener in the shape of a sword,
a tobacco tin I took for a treasure chest – shining on her mantelpiece. She told
me they were made from old shell casings by German prisoners of war held in
camps in Snowdonia. I was fascinated by how these objects had passed from their
hands to my grandmother’s and then to mine. It might have been the first time I
felt history brush up against my own young life.
Q: Your father is Welsh, but your mother is Chinese, and you grew up in
England and now live in the United States. How Welsh do you feel?
A: I wasn’t sure at the outset that I was Welsh enough – whatever that means
– to write the book (I’ve had the same anxiety when writing about Chinese
subjects, too, so it’s a double bind). In the end, though, I think I wrote it
not despite that doubt, but because of it. The writing of the book is an effort
to answer the question, How Welsh am I? Or actually to enlarge that question a
little, to understand what it means to be Welsh.
Q: And what does ...
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In addition to co-authoring The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society with her aunt Mary Ann Shaffer, Annie Barrows is the author of the children's series Ivy and Bean, as well as The Magic Half.
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