DRAGOȘ ILCA was born in 1993 in Romania. He went to high-school there where he studied math and computer science. He didn’t like it very much, so he started writing, mostly about girls he dreamed of dating. His literature teacher caught him writing in class, and to his embarrassment, some stories and poems appeared regularly in the high-school magazine.

           At the age of nineteen, Dragoș got a scholarship and left Romania for the Netherlands, where he studied literature in Amsterdam. He was a freelance writer in his spare time. In his second year as a student, he went to the Chinese University of Hong Kong to study abroad without giving it too much thought. There he started piecing together his debut novel, HK Hollow.

      Returning to Amsterdam, Dragoș decided half a year was not enough to give to Hong Kong, so he applied for a research assistant position at the same university. Currently, Dragoș lives on campus and talks about books and other things in seminar rooms once a week. He sometimes plays video games for too long and has fallen in love with the Hong Kong-style milk tea.

The above description was provided by the writer at the time of publication.

What happens when the characters in a story move across the world but can’t move on?

 HK HOLLOW begins as a simple love story – love lost and love found – that records the bizarre elements in a matter-of-fact kind of way.

 Carina and Guy are a young couple from Prague, studying in Amsterdam, who find themselves even more estranged when Guy leaves to spend a semester in Hong Kong. There, he meets Fēiyān, a Chinese literature student. It doesn’t take long for Guy to notice how much Fēiyān reminds him of Carina – and to start liking her.

AVAILABILITY
Most Proverse Hong Kong titles can be seen and purchased at the Proverse page on the website of our Hong Kong based distributor, the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press:  https://cup.cuhk.edu.hk/Proversehk
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“A street- and book-smart novel of ideas.”

— Jason S Polley, Associate professor, Department of English,  Hong Kong Baptist University.

 “Dragoș Ilca writes with both the innocence of the tourist discovering a new world everyday & also with the passion of an addict.”

—Vlad A. Gheorghiu, author and translator.

  “Dragoș Ilca ... writes like the artistic love child of Kafka and Machado de Assis.”

 —Jonathan Gill, University of Amsterdam.