Kim Fu Books in Order

Kim Fu was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1987 to parents who had immigrated from Hong Kong. She grew up near Vancouver in a diverse community with many Asian families, an experience that gave her an early view of the small and large gaps that can exist between generations, cultures, and private selves.

Those questions would become part of her fiction. Her books often stay close to people trying to define themselves while family expectations, money, grief, memory, or plain bad luck keep getting in the way.

Fu studied psychology and English literature at McGill University in Montreal, where she won the Lionel Shapiro Award for Creative Writing. She later earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia, returning to the Vancouver area for a busy, formative stretch of writing and reading.

Writing was never just a side interest.

Before settling into a full-time writing and editing life, Fu tried several paths, including restaurant work, teaching, and competitive boxing. The variety shows up in the grounded details of her work. Her characters may face unusual situations, but they still worry about jobs, rent, relationships, bodies, and the difficult work of getting through an ordinary day.

Her first novel, For Today I Am a Boy, arrived in 2014. It follows Peter Huang, the only son in a Chinese Canadian family, as she struggles to live openly as a girl under the weight of her father’s rigid expectations. The novel won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Readers drawn to family stories with real emotional pressure will find a book that gives Peter and her sisters room to be complicated people.

Fu’s second novel, The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore, shifts to the Pacific Northwest and a group of girls whose camp kayaking trip goes terribly wrong. It follows Nita, Kayla, Isabel, Dina, and Siobhan beyond that night, tracing how a childhood emergency continues to shape their adult lives. The book was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the OLA Evergreen Award.

She also writes poetry. Her collection How Festive the Ambulance brings together poems that move between dark humor, myth, domestic life, love, and mortality. During Vancouver’s 125th birthday celebrations, Fu took part in a marathon project that involved 125 readings at 125 venues in a single day.

In 2022, she published Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, a collection of twelve speculative stories. Haunted dolls, sea creatures, strange technologies, and transformed bodies appear throughout, but the stories keep their attention on human choices, loneliness, desire, and guilt. The collection won the Pacific Northwest Book Prize, the Washington State Book Award in Fiction, and the Danuta Gleed Literary Award.

Her 2026 novel, The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts, follows a therapist named Eleanor after her mother’s death leads her into an uneasy first home purchase. It brings together grief, money trouble, property damage, and ghostly unease, showing Fu’s interest in how quickly daily life can tilt toward the surreal.

Fu lives in Seattle. Across novels, poems, and stories, she keeps returning to people at a crossroads, often when the route ahead is messier than the one they were told to follow.