- Journalist based in Beijing
- Author of Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China
- Co-editor of While We’re Here, an anthology of stories from China
- Founder and editor of the Anthill, a ‘writers’ colony’ of stories from China
- Journalist based in Beijing
- Author of Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China
- Co-editor of While We’re Here, an anthology of stories from China
- Founder and editor of the Anthill, a ‘writers’ colony’ of stories from China
Alec ASH was born in Oxford, England, in 1986. His father is Timothy Garton Ash, a professor of history, journalist, and author, who met his Polish wife, Danuta, in divided Berlin. After school in nearby Abingdon, Alec studied English literature at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he edited The Isis magazine, wrote a play which performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and hitchhiked to Morocco.
On graduating in 2007, Alec taught English in a Tibetan mountain village in China’s far western Qinghai province for a summer. He later wrote about the location in a chapter anthologised in Chinese Characters (UC Press, 2012). In 2008 he returned to China, to learn Mandarin for two years at Peking University and the IUP course at Tsinghua University, while writing a blog, Six, following six of his Chinese peers, alongside other articles and dispatches from post-Olympic Beijing.
From 2010 to 2012 Alec worked at the literary interview website FiveBooks.com in London, interviewing over fifty authors about their influences. In the summer of 2012 he went back to China, this time overland via Europe and the trans-Siberian express. As a freelancer in Beijing he wrote for The Economist and Dissent among other publications, and was a regular blogger for the Los Angeles Review of Books. He also founded and edited theAnthill.org, a “writers’ colony” of stories from foreigners in China, and co-edited its anthology While We’re Here (Earnshaw Books, 2015).
In the summer of 2016, Alec’s first book Wish Lanterns (Picador, 2016) was published. It narrates the lives of six young Chinese born after 1985, including an aspiring superstar called Lucifer and a Party official’s daughter. The Financial Times called it a “provocative portrait of a fast-changing society” and it was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. The American edition will be published in March 2017, and the book has been translated into German, Greek and Korean. Alec is now focusing on his longform journalism, and is available to speak internationally about Chinese youth and nonfiction writing.
