How Hong Kong poet Mary Jean Chan is wowing Britain’s literary circles with first collection, Flèche

“It was desperation really,” she says. “I was in a very bad place bordering on depression. My parents saw that and knew something had to change.”

Talking to 29-year-old Chan a decade later, in her adopted home city of London, it’s hard to believe she enrolled in the first place. Sensitive and thoughtful, she seems the antithesis of a hardbitten banker or financier. “I always knew I didn’t have a talent for numbers. Maths was my worst subject. My parents were taken aback [by her decision to leave]. My teachers wanted to talk about it.”

Nevertheless, if she hadn’t endured a year of sleepless nights trying to understand accountancy, Chan never would have taken an anthropology course (with the too-good-to-be-true title, “Meanings of Life”), or met the professor who encouraged her to study at America’s Swarthmore College, where her love affair with poetry began. “It was my hobby,” she says. “Gradually my hobby overtook everything.”

This is an understatement. Flèche, Chan’s first full-length collection, was published this year by Faber & Faberand won an Eric Gregory Award, given to poets aged under 30. Her poem The Window was shortlisted for the Forward Prize’s award for best single poem. It is Chan’s second nomination; her first, in 2017, made her the youngest poet to be shortlisted in the prize’s history.