Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud
Author:
Lee Murray
Publisher:
Cuba Press
ISBN:
9781988595771
Date published:
1 April 2024
Pages:
138
Format:
Paperback
RRP:
$28
Wellington, 1923, and a sixty-year-old woman hangs herself in a scullery; ten years later another woman 'falls' from the second floor of a Taranaki tobacconist; soon afterwards a young mother in Taumarunui slices the throat of her newborn with a cleaver. All are women of the Chinese diaspora, who came to Aotearoa for a new life and suffered isolation and prejudice in silence. Chinese Pakeha writer Lee Murray has taken the nine-tailed fox spirit huli jing as her narrator to inhabit the skulls of these women and others like them and tell their stories. 'Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud' is an audacious blend of biography, mythology, horror and poetry that transcends genre to illuminate lives in the shadowlands of our history.
About the author:
Lee Murray is a third-generation Chinese New Zealander and multi-award-winning author, poet and anthology editor. Her manuscript of Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud won her the Grimshaw-Sargeson Fellowship at the development stage and the NZSA Laura Solomon Cuba Press Prize when it was complete. She has won five Bram Stoker Awards, awarded by the international Horror Writers Association for superior achievement, and in New Zealand she has been made an NZSA Honorary Literary Fellow for services to speculative fiction and horror. Her poem 'Cheongsam' won the 2021 Australian Shadows Award.She lives in the Bay of Plenty with her husband and son.
