Erica Li
2025/26
Winning writer Erica Li
My name is Erica, though my family calls me by my Chinese name, Sze Wa, a phrase drawn from a Tang dynasty poem, A Beautiful Zither by Li Shangyin, which means reminiscing about the passing of time and the inevitability of fate. I often wonder if my parents had the premonition that someday, I would endeavour to write stories inspired by our family’s past. Born and raised in Hong Kong, I moved to the UK ten years ago for my studies, and I now practise as an international arbitration lawyer in London.
Writing has always been an integral part of my life. However, I only began working on my novel over the past year, when I was shortlisted for Penguin’s MerkyBooks New Writers’ Prize, and I was accepted onto the six-month Writing a Novel course at Faber Academy. Being selected for the HarperCollins Author Academy and the Covert Talent Development Programme also gave me the confidence to take my writing seriously and to devote more time to honing my craft.
What is your winning novel about?
A Thousand Rivers of Time traces three generations of Hakka-Chinese women from 1945 to the present, spanning China, Hong Kong, England, and America, exploring themes of displacement, identity, and memory.
The story begins when eighty-year-old Mei-chen, who has dementia, receives a letter from her sister Zhi-lan, who was long-presumed drowned during their escape to Hong Kong in the 1960s. Mei-chen enlists her estranged daughter Anita and granddaughter Lydia to find Zhi-lan before time runs out, and their search unravels decades of silence, forcing them to confront a buried past and the rootlessness echoing across generations.
What has helped you improve as a writer?
Reading, and thinking critically about the choices each writer has made in their creative work.
What advice would you give to someone who is considering entering Ascent Novel Prize?
I’d say definitely go for it, you have nothing to lose. Sharing your creative work takes courage, but it’s also such an important first step in any writer’s journey. Do take the time to polish your opening so that the reader is hooked from the very first page. The best piece of advice I’ve ever received is that beautiful writing cannot exist in a vacuum - remember that something needs to happen from the get-go that disrupts and reshapes your characters’ lives.
Opening Pages
PROLOGUE
Hong Kong, Present-day
The only unusual sight this morning, when Mei-chen wakes from another sleepless night, is a layer of frost spread over the petals of the purple magnolias on her windowsill. Unlike in her hometown, Songkou, some hundred miles north of Hong Kong, winters here are usually mild, and the temperatures rarely dip below zero. As she watches the pale December sun rise above the horizon, her flowers appear dusted with sugar, the illusion broken only when the ice melts and slides off the petals.
These days, Mei-chen contents herself with watching the world around her. She expects nothing and has little to look forward to in the time stretching ahead of her. It can be any moment, her doctor reluctantly says, when she presses her about it. Her body hurts everywhere: her knees, ankles, neck, and jaw. Worse still, her memory is fading fast. Misplaced keys, mismatched socks, rice left over on the kitchen counter when it should have gone into the fridge days ago. The last time Mei-chen went to the hospital for a checkup, accompanied by the social worker assigned to elderly people who lived on their own like her, the doctor said Mei-chen had dementia.
Dementia: so what? There’s nothing Mei-chen wants to remember; better forget it all while she can. When asked, Mei-chen said she couldn’t remember if she was turning eighty this year or the year after. She doesn’t have a birth certificate and doesn’t know when she was born. Besides, no one will be there to celebrate her birthday with her. Her husband is long gone, taken away decades ago by prostate cancer, and their three children have immigrated abroad, after the British handed Hong Kong over to China in 1997. Yuk-lan, their eldest and the worst of them all, now calls herself Anita and has moved to England, taking Lydia, her only granddaughter, away with her. Yuk-lan hasn’t visited Mei-chen for years, and their contact has been limited to infrequent letters and half-hearted text messages on a second-hand Sony Ericsson phone Mei-chen struggles to use.
Mei-chen is now forced to find comfort in the predictability of waking when the sun rises, brewing a pot of osmanthus tea, and watching the smoke from the teapot’s mouth twirl in the air before she ventures into the outside world. She would head to Sha Tin train station to collect her free daily newspaper at 7 am, buy a loaf of bread from Cheong’s Bakery, and return home just in time to catch the re-run of her favourite Taiwanese drama on television. All this Mei-chen accomplishes before noon.
Now, as Mei-chen prepares for her lunch in the kitchen, having had another uneventful morning, a knock on her front door breaks the silence in her living room. Opening the front door, she sees a young man in a green uniform, with a messenger bag slung over his shoulder and a yellowed envelope in his hand.