Writers' Trust of Canada

Min

Jia

Min Jia is an artist and writer. Through paintings and short stories, they approach narratives of migration and adaptation through a surreal, metamorphic lens. Their short story “The Sky in The Well” is included in The New Normal on the Margins, a digital anthology published by Wave Art Collective. They were a 2021 Wave Art Writing Fellow and a mentee through the ECW Press BIPOC Writers Mentorship Program. Born in Ürümqi, China, they now divide their time between Berlin, Germany and Toronto.

Writers & Books

Program History

Citation

“I love the ambition, the strangeness, the go-for-brokenness of Min Jia’s novel-in-vignettes, which opens with a girl’s parents working abroad and buying her a gift to salve their absence. It’s a mechanical tail, what every kid wants! Jia uses amazing invention, skill, and deadpan humour to word what feels beyond words and apocalyptic to endure: a family irreversibly refigured by economic migration. Whimsy inflates this project, yet it never loses its stark and sobering emotional truths: magic! I’m so eager to work with this writer so that the world may have this novel as soon as possible.”