Yilong Liu is the winner of our inaugural New Voices Short Fiction Award.

“Deaf Dog Book Club” follows a newly widowed woman whose quiet afternoon at a coffee shop takes an unexpected turn. Funny, tender, and sharply observed, it’s a story about grief, language, connection, and finding your way back into the world. This is a beautiful story and we hope you enjoyed it.

Read it here if you haven’t yet.

Yilong will receive a $200 stipend for finishing first.

Mr. Liu has also jumped onboard The Jitney in an exclusive interview talking about his story.

Can you tell us a little about yourself and your journey as a writer?

I’m a playwright and screenwriter originally from China, and I now live in New York. I studied literature in Beijing before moving to the U.S. to study theatre, eventually attending the Juilliard School as a playwriting fellow.

For most of my career, I’ve written for the stage. My plays have taken me to some unexpected places and introduced me to people and communities I never would have encountered otherwise. I think I’ve always been interested in writing stories about ordinary people doing impossible things just trying to connect with one another, especially across differences in language, culture, generation, and experience.

What inspired you to write this story, and where did the idea first come from?

People-watching in coffee shops is one of my favorite things. I love sitting somewhere and watching strangers, sometimes imagining entire lives for them based on a gesture, a look, or a fragment of conversation.

I don’t know sign language myself. But as someone who is multilingual, I’m fascinated by the way language can create both intimacy and secrecy. There’s something thrilling about communicating in a language that not everyone around you understands, It’s almost as if you’re speaking in code. I think that was where the story first began for me.

Was there a particular character, moment, or theme in the story that was especially meaningful to you? Why?

I think it’s the moment when Margaret decides to sign again. It reminds me that grief can be a gift sometimes, in the strangest way. It is proof that love existed.

Are there any writers, books, or experiences that have influenced your writing and shaped your voice?

I grew up reading Chinese fiction and poetry. I think that sensibility still lives somewhere underneath the way I write, especially the relationship between the everyday and the poetic, the importance of what is left unsaid, and the way memory, family, and history can inhabit a very small moment.

Moving between China and the United States has probably shaped my voice as much as anything I’ve read. Living between languages makes you unusually conscious of words, such as what gets lost and what becomes funnier, stranger, or sadder when you try to explain it in another language. I think a lot of my writing comes from that space in between.

What comes next for your writing?

I’m continuing to write plays and for film and television, but I also want to keep writing fiction. Right now, I’m working on a Western horror story that brings together the mythology and landscape of the American West with traditions of Chinese horror and folklore. I’m quite excited by the collision of those two worlds, and by the chance to explore history, haunting, and migration through genre.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

Having Deaf Dog Book Club recognized in this way is especially encouraging because fiction still feels like new territory for me. It makes me want to keep wandering into it and see what else I might find there.

Writing can be such a solitary and uncertain process, and there’s something wonderful about discovering that a story you wrote alone has reached someone else.

Yilong Liu Bio

Yilong Liu is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter based in New York. His play The Book of Mountains and Seas received the Lambda Literary Award for Drama and was recognized at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with the BBC Popcorn Writing Award. His play Good Enemy premiered Off-Broadway at Audible Theater’s Minetta Lane Theatre.

Yilong is a graduate of The Juilliard School and is currently under commission from Audible Theater and Manhattan Theatre Club.

The 2nd New Voices Fiction Award

Our inaugural contest is now biannual.

We are running it back and the contest is now open.

Don’t wait and feel free to submit here.