Gabriel Tsang

Tsang was born in 1987 or 1988,^[1] and grew up in Tai Po.^[2] He described his academic results as "poor" except for Chinese, in which he scored an A in the Hong Kong Certificate of Education Examination.^[3] He began writing poetry to pursue a female classmate in Form 4,^[1][3] entering a writing contest co-hosted by Sing Tao Daily to attract her attention.^[4] To his unexpectedness, he won the championship, although his classmate had already started dating someone else.^[1][3] He discovered his passion for writing after the contest and began writing diaries and proses.^[5] He initially aimed to study Chinese at Hong Kong Baptist University, but due to insufficient A-Level grades, he instead studied business administration at City University of Hong Kong.^[1][3] He described himself as "not too interested" about business but remained passionate about writing during university, participating in various writing competitions.^[3] He wrote his first novel Stand while he was on exchange to Nanjing University in his third year and published in 2010.^[3] After graduation, Tsang taught at a secondary school and served as a writer-in-residence, during which he wrote the romance novels Low-Level Love and Silent Desire and Nothingness, inspired by his personal experiences as a teacher.^[6][7] He then pursued a Master of Arts and a Doctor of Philosophy in comparative literature at the University of Hong Kong and King's College London respectively.^[7][8]

Following the completion of his doctoral thesis, Tsang authored an AI-themed romantic sci-fi novel, Love in the Era of Post-human, inspired by the AlphaGo versus Ke Jie chess match,^[9] and he published the novel in 2018.^[10] Dung Kai-cheung, reviewing for Ming Pao, praised the novel's innovative approach of "attempting to explore a robot's perspective, imagining its thought processes and even emotional world";^[11] while Lam Suet-ping of Fleurs des lettres described it as a "literary experiment" that "approached the world from a different angle, showcasing the phenomena beyond human limits".^[12] After earning his PhD, Tsang taught at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou for several years, before returning to Hong Kong to teach at Hong Kong Baptist University in 2021.^[3][6]

In 2022, he published Three, a short romance stories and essays collection.^[3][6] Cheng Din-ho of P-articles praised the collection's exploration of love as more "pure" than his previous novels, noting the recurring tropes that run throughout the book emphasize "patience and tolerance in love".^[13] In 2023, Tsang received the Award for Young Artist (Literary Arts) at the Hong Kong Arts Development Awards [zh].^[14] He joined the Hong Kong Film Critics Society around 2024 and contributed film reviews to The News Lens.^[15] He also published Chinese Educated Youth Literature: Ambivalent Bodies and Personal Literary Histories, a scholarly study on 1980s Chinese youth intellectuals, in 2024.^[16] He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at HKBU,^[10] teaching prose writing and Hong Kong literature.^[4]