So happy for this young writer to win this award!

Pik-Shuen Fung has won the 2022 Amazon Canada First Novel Award for her novel Ghost Forest. The $60,000 prize honours the best first novel in English published the previous year by a citizen or resident of Canada.

Pik-Shuen Fung, author of Ghost Forest (Strange Light) is the winner of the forty-sixth annual Amazon Canada First Novel Award, which celebrates first-time Canadian novelists. How do you grieve, if your family doesn’t talk about feelings? This is the question the unnamed protagonist of Ghost Forest considers after her father dies. One of the many Hong Kong “astronaut” fathers, he stays there to work, while the rest of the family immigrated to Canada before the 1997 Handover, when the British returned sovereignty over Hong Kong to China. As she revisits memories of her father through the years, she struggles with unresolved questions and misunderstandings. Turning to her mother and grandmother for answers, she discovers her own life refracted brightly in theirs.