Kirstin Zhang

 

...was brought up in Papua New Guinea during one of the worst droughts in its history. She now lives on the west coast of Scotland and never complains about the rain.
Following studies at Keio University, Tokyo, and the School of Oriental & African Studies, Kirstin completed a MLitt in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow and was subsequently mentored by the author Romesh Gunesekera.

Winner of The Scotsman and Orange Short Fiction Prize (her winning entry, ‘The Enemy Within’, is Kirstin’s  contribution to this anthology) and 2014’s Fish Short Memoir Prize, her works of fiction have appeared in various publications, including GQ, Soho House Magazine and The Scotsman. She is currently working on a short story collection ‘In Their Song’, set in Japan during the dying days of the Pacific War.

The inspiration for ‘The Enemy Within’ was a picture in the Guardian of men spraying against dengue fever in Indonesia, and a short article about the upcoming elections there.
In 1965, the slaughter of nearly one million suspected Communists during an army coup by General Suharto was largely ignored by the Western press, and is still not widely discussed in Indonesia itself. Many more potential victims have lived for nearly thirty years alongside their enemy, always watching, always waiting to be discovered…