British author of Anglo-Chinese descent. Born 1950.
A witty style and tragicomic storylines characterise the writings of Timothy Mo. His early novels, The Monkey King (1978) and Sour Sweet (1982) are not as confidently written as his later works. However, the germ is present, in the early works, of the wry style that Mo later perfected in An Insular Possession (1986, a pseudo-history about colonial masters in China) and A Redundancy of Courage (1992, about an unwilling victim of guerilla warfare in South-East Asia).