Catching up with 2025 Non-Fiction Prize Winner Brandon Toh

October 9, 2025 | Awards, blog, Prizes

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TLT: “The Difference Between Ghost and Ghost and Ghost” feels so deeply personal, like you’re sharing your family archive with us. Why did you choose the particular histories, legends, and poems that you incorporated into this essay?

BT: I chose these fragments because they happened to resonate with this one idea I had been thinking about—the impermanence of ghosts. The essay started with the “poems,” which are really dictionary entries from the first extant Chinese dictionary,《说文解字》. I loosely translated these entries into poems, and in so, noticed that if words and semantics, the stuff which we rely on to understand one another, could be so malleable, then memories stand no chance of retaining a solid form. The legends I chose had to do with ghosts, but they are also a mix of fact, myth, and interpretation. Those stories have been around for centuries, and their modern form is very much different from the original. I find family history to be similar in that sense. Fact, myth, and interpretation. The facts are physical, the myths a more communal effort on the part of the family, and the interpretation personal. In including specific episodes of my family history, I am simply capturing the form they took as I wrote them. They will inevitably change as I age, and writing them down when I did was the only way I could record what they meant to me at that moment in time.

TLT: Could you guide us through your process of writing this piece?

BT: When I decided to write about ghosts, I picked out all the entries of Chinese characters with the ghost radical from 《说文解字》 and translated them. The ones that made for decent poems were used in the piece. Then, as I was writing the legends, I found myself unable to keep the immediacy of my father’s passing out of the piece. The piece was originally meant to be less personal and more discursive, but I had to write about this loss, which carried an immensity that I did not realise, and am still coming to terms with. And so I was translating, writing, and grieving all at once on the page, until all the fragments were written. I took weeks after that arranging the three threads in a way that hopefully conveys the simultaneity of all that happening in heart and mind.

TLT: The essay presents beautifully on the page and the screen with your artistic use of different Chinese characters. How would you read this aloud?

BT: For the dictionary entries, I’d read the Chinese character and the definition first, then the translation.

TLT: What did you do differently or most effectively that makes “The Difference Between Ghost and Ghost and Ghost” so impactful? How did you know this essay was ready for publication?

BT: I don’t think I did anything that different for the piece. I simply worked on what I was obsessed with (the dictionary entries and the legends), and wrote what I felt I had to (the personal history). Perhaps the only thing that was unusual on my part was that, after weeks of tinkering with the order of the fragments, I gave up. I accepted that there will always be frayed edges, and that I could never convey in full accuracy what I was feeling. When I accepted that the ordering of the fragments is imperfect, and that I could no longer inhabit that initial state of mind to continue writing the same piece, I knew it was done.

TLT: Your essay ends with a shift toward a sense of wonder, hope. How reflective of your outlook is this piece now, compared to where you were before beginning this generative exploration?

BT: I’d like to quote the cartoonist Eleanor Davis, who wrote: “The world keeps ending and it keeps not ending. I live as if it’s ending and I live as if it will never end.” I don’t think she was talking about oscillating between the two modes. In feelings and at times belief, we often tend towards paradox. I don’t believe in ghosts, but in my writing, sometimes I suspect that I secretly do. I often say that life is meaningless, but just as often I find reason to love living. The piece still reflects my outlook since it has only been slightly over a year since I wrote it, though as more time passes, it might become an occasional glimmer.

TLT: In addition to writing essays, you also work as a translator. The new AirPods 3 are advertising that they will come with live translation. Thoughts?

BT: On a practical level, it is hard to argue against accessibility and ease of communication across cultures and languages. However, considering that mutual understanding is the goal of communication, the same ease afforded by this technology might breed complacency and lead to many succumbing to the illusion of explanatory depth.

As we are seeing today, people have the tendency to deify the functions of Large Language Models (LLMs). It is easy to be awed by the quality of their output and forget that said output is bolstered by a deluge of underpaid, undervalued human work. I once took on a translation project that involved training a LLM, and I was given multiple excel files containing a variety of Chinese sentences to translate. One of the entries I had to translate was a Classical Chinese poem! All that translation was not only uncredited, it was also the lowest paying project I ever took on, because they needed many translators to provide the LLM with enough training material. This part of the technology is treated as unsightly and rendered invisible. When LLMs scrape the internet for data or rely on crowdsourcing platforms to get raw data, they are rendering human work invisible. Their ease of use also means we easily become reliant on them without understanding what makes them tick.

With the live translation feature, I worry that we might end up with the false belief that perfect translation is not only possible, but already achieved. Misunderstandings abound even when we speak the same language within a shared culture, let alone when languages and cultures collide. A slower, more involved translation or interpretation process serves to constantly remind us that communication is fraught with difficulties, that to achieve mutual understanding would require empathy and an earnest desire to understand and be understood.

Looking at situations in which the live translation feature is most useful (conversations while travelling, buying things on a trip), I believe that we are denying ourselves a certain serendipity when we are in a foreign land. When we allow ourselves to be in a different country yet have our ears hear only English, we are denying ourselves the discovery of shared humanity that happens when we have to resort to the simplest of words and hand gestures, while still understanding one another in doing that. When I am in a different part of the world, I want to hear a different tongue, and be made aware of just how much I don’t know. I fear that we become a culture that settles for the perfunctory.

TLT: Who are you reading now that excites you or influences your own work, and how does that influence show up in this essay?

BT: I take a lot of cue from Anne Carson, as she is also a translator-writer, and often mixes the academic and the personal in her work. Nox showed me that it is possible to present two seemingly unrelated threads on the page and have an intangible, emotional core that surfaces, a sum greater than its parts. It also illustrated the simultaneity of our multitudes, that even when grieving, we seldom grieve completely and utterly. When grieving, we are still creatively alive, we are still bound by the demands of work, and we still find comfort in our hobbies. I believe Carson’s influence is obvious in this essay, given the parallels.

Maggie Nelson is another major influence. From her I found permission to take a singular idea, however small or seemingly infeasible, and take a scattershot approach in collecting and recollecting material. Nelson’s work also proves that precision in expression at times requires a fragmented form. I still return to Bluets often to glean and explore how fragmented writing can be arranged to achieve that unbroken, unobtrusive flow in reading.

Finally, considering that I mainly write creative nonfiction, I have gained a lot by reading Classical Chinese texts. Chinese literature has a much older and established tradition in creative nonfiction reaching back to the 4th century BC with the publication of the Zuo Zhuan. Given the long history, the genre has gone through many twists and turns, with each literary experimentation realising specific expressive intent. By “translating” certain approaches and ideas into modern English, I find that I can write essays that occupy a different, perhaps unexplored space in the English-based literary imagination.

TLT: What insights did you learn in writing this that could be helpful to share with writers who are in their early stages?

BT: Mainly that we don’t need to seek permission to write experimentally and temperamentally, that not everything we write needs to “work.” And in reading, too, we can read experimentally and temperamentally. We can only write and read at (insert age here) while we are (insert age here), carrying the burdens of being (insert age here), relishing the joys of being (insert age here), loving and hating the world at (insert age here) in ways specific to being (insert age here). So write and read freely, because now is always the only time we can write and read as a (insert age here)-year-old.

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