Esmé Weijun Wang on Writing in An Unexpected Shape

“I think that writers could feel much less lonely in what is already a fairly lonely vocation, if there were more conversations about this.”

Esmé Weijun Wang is a novelist and essayist, and the creator of the Unexpected Shape community. Her debut novel, The Border of Paradise, was called a Best Book of 2016 by NPR and one of the 25 Best Novels of 2016 by Electric Literature. She was named by Granta as one of the “Best of Young American Novelists” in 2017, and is the recipient of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize for her forthcoming essay collection, The Collected Schizophrenias. Born in the Midwest to Taiwanese parents, she lives in San Francisco.