Kaiya Shang on her Vintage run as nominations for Rising Stars 2024 open

At this year’s London Book Fair, Kaiya Shang is giving the back-to-back meetings – a method applied last time around – a wide berth. A more manageable, if still equally busy, schedule is sensibly on the cards.

Shang is living up to the expectations of a Shooting Star. Mere months after her nomination in 2022—when she was at Scribner, commissioning titles including Hyper by Agri Ismaïl, one of the first ever novels written in English and published in the UK by a Kurdish author—she moved to Vintage imprint Chatto & Windus. (And she took Hyper with her).

“I feel like The Bookseller piece probably played quite a part in me getting the job,” she says, concluding that it put her on the radar of publishing director Clara Farmer when hiring commenced. While the exposure was undoubtedly helpful, Shang’s potential did the rest. She doesn’t hide the fact that Vintage was her dream destination, a place “so prestigious and whose work I admired from afar for years”, having devoured Chatto books as a teenager. A year and a half on the job and her assessment is that it’s “even better than I imagined it would be”.

Allowed to grow as an editor at Chatto, Shang is thriving. “I’ve acquired quite a lot and I feel that Clara, particularly, and also deputy publishing director Becky Hardie have been so supportive of everything.”

The backing she has received from Farmer, Hardie and the wider Vintage team has given Shang rein to build a list of nine to 10 books a year. Two titles for 2025 are being announced at LBF. The first is from long standing Chatto author Xiaolu Guo. “I absolutely love her,” Shang says with genuine affection. “Her memoir Once Upon a Time in the East was something that inspired me a lot.” It’s a joy, then, that Guo has kept her busy since joining Chatto, having also released Radical, a second memoir, last year. “It was really beautiful to inherit her as an author, and she has recently turned her hand to something new—and it’s very exciting.”

Shang describes it: “It’s a reimagining of Moby-Dick called Call Me Ishmaelle, written from a feminist and Eastern perspective. Set in the 1860s, slightly after the original, we have a mixed crew with some Black freemen, including the captain; the main character is a cross-dressed female sailor and there is a Taoist monk on board. It plots out many of the beats from the original book, so in that sense it’s somewhat traditional compared to [Guo’s] previously experimental work, but at the same time she puts a fascinating twist on it.”

The backing she has received from Farmer, Hardie and the wider Vintage team has given Shang rein to build a list of nine to 10 books a year

Shang is equally effusive about The Family Matter, the second novel by Claire Lynch, author of small: on motherhoods, which was published by Brazen in 2021. “Everyone’s been raving about this really beautiful, slim début novel, inspired by a shocking historic injustice.” Shang explains a little-known fact to set the scene of the story: that in 1980s Britain, more than 90% of lesbians lost full custody of their children in family court cases. “So the author has written an absolutely heart-breaking but also very hopeful novel centring around one family and how they heal.” Shang believes it will appeal to fans of Louise Kennedy and Clare Chambers.

As for the longer-term plans, Shang is going nowhere soon. The charm and excitement of working at Vintage hasn’t worn off, if indeed it ever will. She smiles, “I really love the environment here: the energy and creativity, the people and the list.”

For information on submitting an entry for the Rising Stars Class of 2024, click here