An Insular Possession

Timothy Mo was born in Hong Kong in 1950 to a Cantonese father and an English mother. He was educated in Hong Kong and England. After graduating from St John's College, Oxford, he worked as a journalist for the New Statesman and Boxing News. With Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro, Timothy Mo emerged in the 1980s as one of the most important novelists writing about bi-cultural diversity, reflecting both his Anglo-Chinese background and his concerns for the effects of imperialism and colonial rule in South-East Asia.His first novel,The Monkey King(1978), set in Hong Kong, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. His next three novels were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction:Sour Sweet(1982), the story of a Chinese immigrant family living in London, winner of the Hawthornden Prize; An Insular Possession(1986), set during the Opium Wars between Britain and China in the first half of the nineteenth century; and The Redundancy of Courage(1991), a fictional account of Indonesia's annexation of East Timor in 1976.Sour Sweet was adapted as a film in 1988 with a screenplay by Ian McEwan. Mo has published his two most recent books himself. Both are set in the Philippines: Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard(1995), set during an academic conference, a satire of cultural and imperial domination, while Renegade or Halo2(1999) describes the adventures of Rey Archimedes Blondel Castro, the son of an American G.I. and a Filipina bar-girl. Renegade or Halo2 was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction).