Yuyi He (She/Her)
Social Media Manager Manager, and Nonfiction Editor
Spring 2025 – present
Yuyi He is a third-year Philosophy and Psychology student at the University of Edinburgh. She was born in a small town in southern China but moved with her family to Toronto, Canada when she was twelve. She began to write at sixteen, trying to cope with loneliness and stress posed by cultural shock, learning English as a second language, and feeling out of place as a teen on the spectrum. Luckily, her future self can confirm her efforts in the English language have not been wasted. While she mostly writes prose nowadays (short story and creative nonfiction), she also has twenty-something poems waiting to be edited.
In her writings, she focuses on using figures of speech to make everything ordered and beautiful at the sentence level. Her prose is more about the inner life of characters than the external story arc, and it reads more poetic than narrative, with rich symbols, emotional descriptions, and unnecessary philosophical musings. She is interested in exploring the depths of the human psyche through writing. Her magical-realist short story Ouroboros over a Pond of Water Lilies was published by The Word’s Faire in their debut anthology That’s Absurd!. You can find her second publication, Go to the Limits of Your Longing, under Nonfiction in the Summer 2024 issue of Spellbinder! She has an Instagram account dedicated to her writing: @yuyi_loves_beauty.
It might come as a surprise given her style that she does not enjoy reading the Modernists. Her main literary inspiration is Mishima Yukio. She also likes Dazai Osamu, Kawabata Yasunari, the fairy tales of Andersen, and the poems of Rimbaud and Baudelaire. She is a self-taught Japanese speaker and has translated songs and novellas written by her favourite band, Yorushika. Being in Edinburgh, she is also exposed to Scottish Literature, and finds the works of Ali Smith and Kathleen Jamie closest to heart. Otherwise, she spends most of her time studying the philosopher-psychoanalyst C. G. Jung. As a Christian convert with a vague interest in the esoteric, she is determined to follow his career path.