Winnie M Li

I have published two critically acclaimed novels, with a third out in 2025. My debut Dark Chapter (2017) won The Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize and was nominated for an Edgar Award.  I recently adapted it for the screen, funded by Northern Ireland Screen and the British Film Institute, and the book will be re-issued in a new edition in 2025.

My second novel Complicit (2022) was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature's Encore Award. My third novel, What We Left Unsaid, will be published in August 2025. In total, my novels have been translated into twelve different languages, and I have spoken about them at The Hay Festival, Edinburgh Book Festival, The Houses of Parliament, etc. and as far afield as South Africa, South Korea, Iceland, and California.

I am Chinese-American (originally from New Jersey), but have lived and worked abroad for twenty-five years. Travel remains a keen interest of mine, both personally and intellectually, and my writing often explores themes of displacement and belonging, trauma, the media, cross-cultural encounters, and social inequalities.

Before becoming a novelist, I worked in the film industry for ten years. As a producer and script editor for a London-based independent film production company, I worked on six feature films featuring A-list talent, and two shorts: Cashback (2004) which was Oscar-nominated, and Vagabond Shoes (2006) which was Oscar-shortlisted. Later, I programmed for the Doha Tribeca Film Festival in Qatar.

My film producing career came to a sudden halt when I was violently assaulted and raped by a stranger in 2008, and my subsequent work has often focused on changing the public narrative around sexual violence to reflect a survivor’s perspective. This ultimately drove me to write Dark Chapter and pursue my own creative writing.

My essays have appeared in The Guardian, LitHub, CrimeReads, Wasafiri, BBC Radio 4, Bustle, Sight & Sound, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. I’ve received grants from the Royal Society of Literature, Jerwood Arts, and the Arts Councils of England and Northern Ireland for my literary projects. I am very involved in curating and chairing panels and author talks, which began with founding the Clear Lines Festival in 2015, the UK’s first-ever festival addressing sexual assault and consent through the arts and discussion. I’m accustomed to working with the media, and have appeared on the BBC, Sky News, Channel 4, BBC Woman’s Hour, The Guardian, The Times, The Irish Times, TEDx London, among other outlets.

Prior to my post at the University of Birmingham, I taught at Goldsmiths, the LSE, and for organisations like the Arvon Foundation, The Literary Consultancy, Writing on the Wall, and Spread the Word. I hold an honorary doctorate of law from the National University of Ireland, in recognition of my writing and activism.  

• Author website

Both my creative work and academic research explore the legacy of trauma and social disadvantage, that is gendered, racialised, and classed, and located within a specific environment -- but also the role of individual will in forging a new path ahead in an unequal world.

Creative Writing 

My debut novel Dark Chapter (2017) is a fictional retelling of my real-life stranger rape, equally seen from victim and perpetrator perspectives. It strives to examine the criminal justice system and societal attitudes towards sexual violence, through two very different characters.

My second novel Complicit (2022) explores #MeToo in the film industry from the behind-the-scenes perspective of a young female Chinese-American film producer, raising questions of power, privilege, and regret. It also considers professional ambition, the filmmaking process, and the role of cinema in our collective imagination.

My third novel, What We Left Unsaid (2025), is a road trip narrative that follows three estranged Chinese-American siblings, as they drive Route 66 together across post-Covid America to see their ailing mother in California. I wanted to interrogate American ideals of travel and adventure, by placing an individual family’s fraught history against the complicated legacy of people of color in the American West.

In terms of craft, I often use suspense and play with genres like crime and mystery to explore my themes, while multi-person perspectives and a keen sense of place are also important aspects of my writing. I am interested in the ethics and creative practice involved in representing trauma, violence, and victimhood, with its    intersections of race, class, and gender.

PhD Research on rape survivors and the media

For my PhD in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, I examined the emotional labor of rape survivors who have appeared in mainstream media to recount their trauma. I combined my own auto-ethnographic writing and interview data with other ‘mediated’ sexual violence survivors, exploring our experiences collaborating with mainstream media platforms.  In addition to unpacking why a rape survivor would want to appear in the media, my research also questioned the ethics of media practice involving survivors, the worrying lack of compensation for media work, and the role of cultural capital in enabling certain voices to be heard above others.

I have been commissioned to adapt some of this material into a chapter for the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Gender, Violence, and Popular Culture, and I am also developing my PhD into a non-fiction book proposal.