About

Shannon Young is an American author living in Hong Kong.

Her books include Ferry Tale, Year of Fire Dragons: An American Woman’s Story of Coming of Age in Hong Kong (Blacksmith Books), and a Kindle Single called Pay Off: How One Millennial Eliminated Nearly $80,000 in Student Debt in Less Than Five Years (Kindle Single) about her journey into and out of student debt.

She edited an anthology of creative non-fiction entitled How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit? True Stories of Expat Women in Asia (Signal 8 Press, June 2014). In November of 2013, she self-published a novella in front of a live audience at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong. The novella, The Art of Escalator Jumping, is a love story set on and around the Midlevels Escalator. Shannon had a column on The Displaced Nation called Diary of an Expat Writer, and she has written for Mary: A journal of new writing, Modern Love Long Distance, the IMPRINT anthology (Hong Kong Women in Publishing Society, 2012-17), and various expat and writing websites.

Her latest story, set on the historic Pottinger Steps, appears in the Hong Kong Noir anthology from Akashic.

Shannon grew up in a homeschooling family of nine kids in Arizona. She got her first cross-cultural experience by moving to New York to study at Colgate University. She graduated from Colgate in 2009 and taught high school English literature in Arizona before moving to Hong Kong in 2010. Now a full-time writer, she lives in Hong Kong’s Soho with her husband.

Shannon makes a living writing science fiction and fantasy under a pen name. She organises a weekly writing meet-up and occasionally speaks to students and writers’ groups about her work. She once won an episode of Literary Death Match.

Shannon has been documenting her writing journey on YouTube. Here’s more about this adventure: