Ysabelle Cheung is Editor-at-Large at The Offing. She holds a BA from the University of East Anglia in creative writing. She is formerly the Associate Editor of Time Out Hong Kong; her cultural criticism has appeared in Artforum, Hyperallergic and VICE. She is also currently working on a short fiction collection and lives in New York with an invisible pig.
What doors do you open at The Offing?
I read and recommend fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that I find worthy of a platform — usually underrepresented because of translation barriers.
What doors does The Offing open for you?
The team is so incredibly supportive and diversified in knowledge, reach and vision for the various sections. Even the discussions we hold offline, off guard, are insightful and help me be a better reader, writer and humanoid.
Is there a piece you’ve worked on or found at The Offing that’s been especially meaningful to you?
“I Just Want to See the Sea,” by Hon Lai Chu, for the nonfiction essay section. It was the first piece I put through, and it’s a piece very close to me as I was an active protester in the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong.
What would you like to see us do with the donations we receive during our fundraiser?
Expand! Grow. And reward the brilliant writers and staff that make up The Offing.
Anything else? Tell us something about your experience with The Offing and why this work is meaningful to you.
A safe and non-hostile environment to express thoughts in and to deliver work in is a privilege that everyone should have in the literary world. Unfortunately that’s not always the case, but the discourses and definitions at The Offing are always non-conformist and ever-fluid, in recognition of its name and also the truth of the world we live in.