Linda Rui Feng Books in Order

If you want her novel first: Swimming Back to Trout River
If you're curious about her scholarship: City of Marvel and Transformation
If you want both sides of her work: City of Marvel and Transformation → Swimming Back to Trout River

Linda Rui Feng was born in Shanghai and has since lived in San Francisco, New York, and Toronto. She works in two lanes that speak to each other all the time, fiction and Chinese cultural history, and she teaches at the University of Toronto.

Science came first.

As an undergraduate at Harvard, she studied Earth and Planetary Sciences and spent time in labs and research settings, expecting that a life in science might be ahead of her. But a geology field trip in Ontario shifted something. She later wrote that a professor's habit of asking what story a landscape or rock formation held stayed with her, and that way of looking helped pull her toward narrative.

From there, her path bent toward the humanities. She earned an MA and PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia, then built an academic career focused on space, movement, writing, and the senses. At Toronto she has taught courses on cartography, food in East Asia, travel writing, and the history of scent.

That love of place sits at the center of City of Marvel and Transformation, her 2015 scholarly book on Chang'an in Tang dynasty China. It looks at how writers experienced the imperial capital, how ambition and travel shaped their lives, and how a city can become both a real place and a mental one. Readers interested in history and literary culture tend to like the way Feng connects urban life to lived experience.

Fiction grew alongside the scholarship. Feng has received two MacDowell Fellowships for fiction, and her prose and poetry have appeared in journals such as The Fiddlehead, Kenyon Review Online, Santa Monica Review, Salamander, Nimrod, and Washington Square Review. She has said that when she first began writing, she often started with images or sentences she trusted, then learned to keep going even when the larger shape of the story was still unclear.

Swimming Back to Trout River, published in 2021, brought many of those interests together in a new form. Set between China and America, it follows a family split by migration, memory, and old political wounds, with music running through the novel from beginning to end. The book was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and also appeared on major prize lists that year. Readers often respond to its quiet emotional force and the way it lets history live inside ordinary people.

Place matters to her.

Again and again, Feng returns to questions of movement and staying put, of what families carry across borders, and of how the past sits inside the present. Rivers, coasts, city grids, rooms, and routes all matter in her work. So do characters who are trying to make a home while history, ambition, and memory keep tugging at them.

These days, Toronto seems to be the place where those interests meet. She continues to teach, research, and write, and her recent academic work includes the cultural history of aromatics in late medieval China. Whether she is writing about Tang dynasty Chang'an or a family stretched between continents, she pays close attention to how place shapes feeling, thought, and story.