Competition

We're delighted to announce that our latest Bai Meigui competition is now open, and it's a bit different from our previous ones...

We're currently running our first ever Bai Meigui Creative Writing Competition, open exclusively to current UK residents who have familial roots in and/or have previously lived in Hong Kong, and who have not yet had a full length piece of creative work published in English.

Theme

The theme for this competition is: Writing Hong Kong.

Entries may be poems, short stories, or creative nonfiction. You may get some inspiration for this topic, and ways of approaching it, by attending our event in Leeds on 8th May, where our judges will be discussing the topic and possible approaches. If you can't make it to Leeds you can join us online, and the discussions will also be available afterwards on our Youtube channel (link to follow).

Word count

Poetry: up to 50 lines per poem

Prose (fiction/ creative non-fiction): max. 5000 words

Launch and Closing date

The deadline is midnight (UK time) on 30 June 2024. Entries can be submitted from 8 May 2024, when we'll be officially launching the competition at our Writing Hong Kong event.

The Prize

Entrants of the top three winning pieces will receive an Arvon voucher for a creative writing workshop (worth £90) and their work will be featured on the Writing Chinese website. Longlisted entries will also be published in a pdf booklet, available on the website. (Winners and longlisted entries may choose to be published under their name, pseudonym, or anonymously). Results will be announced in August 2024. Winning entrants will also be invited to read their works in an online event in Autumn 2024.

Copyright of all entries will be retained by the authors.

The Judges

Karen Cheung is the author of The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir (Random House). Her essays, reported features, and cultural criticism have been published in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, New York Magazine, This American Life, New Statesman and elsewhere. She co- runs the literary journal Cicada. She is currently a part-time lecturer at Hong Kong Baptist University’s Department of Humanities & Creative Writing, and is our Centre's bookclub featured author for April/May.

Kit Fan is a poet, novelist and critic. His debut novel is Diamond Hill (2021). His latest poetry collection The Ink Cloud Reader (2023) was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Twice shortlisted for the Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize and the TLS Mick Imlah Poetry Prize, he has won Northern Writers Awards for Fiction and Poetry, the Times Stephen Spender Poetry Translation Prize, and POETRY Editors’ Prize for Reviewing. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.

Jennifer Wong is the author of 回 家Letters Home (Nine Arches Press). She is the author of Identity, Home and Writing Elsewhere in Contemporary Chinese Diaspora Poetry (Bloomsbury, 2023) and a co-editor of State of Play: Poets of East and Southeast Asian Heritage in Conversation (Outspoken Press, 2023). Together with Jason Eng Hun Lee and Tim Tim Cheng, she co-edited Where Else: An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology (Verve Poetry Press, 2023). She has guest-edited a special issue on Hong Kong literature for the online Writing Chinese journal (Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing).

 

How to enter

All works must be original, unpublished works by the author. Any input from AI must be acknowledged in the submission.

[All works must be written primarily in English, although the use of other languages as part of the piece is of course permitted.]

There is a limit of 3 entries per person.

Please send your entries as an email (MSWord) attachment to our competition coordinator Yueran at mlywang@leeds.ac.uk. (And please do get in touch if you have any queries about eligibility to enter).

In the body of the email please include your name, contact details, and how you'd like your name to appear if your entry is chosen for publication. We’d also be interested to know your current country of residence, what you consider to be your first language, and whether you have had any translations published previously. This information will NOT be available in any form to the judging panel, but is useful for our records, and planning purposes for future competitions. (The only information that you must include in order to submit, is your name/contact details/ name to appear on published work).

Please do not include your name/any identifying information in the attachment.

Please note that we will not normally be able to provide feedback on entries, but thank you, in advance, for your submission.

Entries can only be submitted between 8th May and 30th June 2024 (closes midnight UK time).

Good luck!