Mother Tongue by Hilda Hoy

On 1st March 2026, over at Wind&Bones Books - the independent publisher I co-direct - we were delighted to publish Mother Tongue by Hilda Hoy.

I met Hilda after we'd both 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 Taiwan Literature Base in Taipei for a period of 7 to 30 days.

The Taiwan Literature Base Writers-in-Residence programme seeks to promote Taiwanese literature and cultural creativity, foster connections between the creative industry and the commercial sector, and invigorate both domestic and international literary and cultural exchange. It also aims to nurture literary talent in Taiwan and reconstruct historical literary narratives.

To date, the programme has hosted nearly 60 writers and translators from Taiwan and abroad.

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.

Mother Tongue is an exploration of the manifold capacities of language and its ability to shape one’s sense of self, to bring together, to hold apart.

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. Published 1st March 2026 with a foreword by Taiwanese translator Jenna Tang, this book 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. £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.

At Wind&Bones Books we have lots more scheduled for our publishing list in 2026, including poetry, curiosities and fiction we love—things too strange, too wayward, or too fine to find a home elsewhere.