Hello from Hannah and Will at Wind&Bones!
In celebration of International Women’s Day on 8th March we thought we’d focus this newsletter on the brilliant writer Hilda Hoy.
We published Hilda Hoy’s book Mother Tongue on 1st March, and we are thrilled to see it making its way in the world. Mother Tongue is an exploration of the manifold capacities of language and its ability to shape one’s sense of self.
Raised in Taiwan by her Taiwanese mother and Canadian father, bilingual from the beginning, Hoy examines her experience of growing up with otherness, and traces how English became her dominant tongue. After many years living in Canada and Europe, her Chinese-speaking self packed into a box and sealed shut, the repercussions of her loss of Mandarin are thrown into sharp focus when her mother is diagnosed with dementia, and begins losing the ability to speak.
A tender exploration of grief and reconnection, of belonging and self, Mother Tongue is the story of a journey to locate one’s voice between hybrid places. The book also contains a gorgeous foreword by Taiwanese translator Jenna Tang. Mother Tongue is available worldwide in paperback and EPUB formats.
“Subtle, yet incredibly tender” — Jenna Tang, translator of Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise.
Get your copy from the Wind&Bones Bookshop for £8 plus postage packing. Worldwide shipping is available.
“When I speak Mandarin with my mother, I am reminded of the distance that separates us—of my foreignness from the person who made me.”
Hilda Hoy is a Taiwanese Canadian writer, editor, and translator based in Berlin. In addition to working as a reporter for the Toronto Star and the Prague Post, she has published narrative non-fiction in Roads & Kingdoms, Slate, BBC Travel, and Narratively, as well as a travel guidebook titled The HUNT: Berlin. She previously served as an editor at Sugarhigh magazine and the print monthly Where Berlin while also writing a column for Siegessäule, a magazine for Berlin’s queer community.
Hilda is currently working on a graphic memoir (in collaboration) and an essay collection exploring the entanglement of identity and language in individuals with backgrounds in migration or displacement. In December 2024, this project saw Hilda serve as writer-in-residence at the Taiwan Literature Base in Taipei. The diaspora experience and examinations of identity are central themes in her writing.
We met Hilda after we'd all completed writing residencies at the Taiwan Literature Base in Taipei, Taiwan back in 2025.
The Taiwan Literature Base, which is managed by the National Museum of Taiwan Literature (NMTL), runs a writers-in-residence programme which offers writers the opportunity to reside at the Literature Base in Taipei to work on their writing projects. It seeks to promote Taiwanese literature and cultural creativity and to foster connections, and international literary and cultural exchange.
It has been such a pleasure to connect with Hilda as fellow graduates of the writer-in-residence programme and to work with her to refine this beautiful and personal story.
