Why Here, Why Now

The Shanghai Literary Review was founded by four writers living between Shanghai and New York City in 2016. The reasons for starting the Review were simple: we wanted to create an outlet for up and coming literature and art in Shanghai that served an international audience; Shanghai needed a center to its literary community; we wanted a place for dialogue between new artists in one of Asia's most powerful and cosmopolitan cities and the literary world at large.

The magazine was founded to give a platform to talented artists and thinkers from this region of the world or those working to understand this time and place. Beyond that, the magazine provides a record, through art, of a dialogue that resonates for our generation: the attempt to define and understand the home, the self, and those who came before us.

Now more than ever, literature and art have the power to contest, subvert, and redefine our global cultural landscape. The editors of The Shanghai Literary Review live and work on opposite sides of the world, but we believe in art that transcends borders. We hope our collections will feature the beauty, fissure, and complexity of art emerging from this new globalization.