YOON HA LEE

WHAT EXACTLY DOES IT MEAN TO SEE a scene in the mind’s eye? It’s one of the questions that keyed off Yoon Ha Lee’s Phoenix Extravagant. At the novel’s centre lies a painter, Gyen Jebi, yet Lee is someone who “really cannot visualise things at all”, a condition known as aphantasia.

“When people read a book, and say, ‘Oh, yeah, I see a movie inside my head,’ I thought for the longest time that they were pulling my leg,” he explains. “Then I talked