Writing Hong Kong

Join us for a special event featuring authors Kit Fan, Jennifer Wong, and Karen Cheung, exploring UK - Hong Kong ties through poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction.

The event will begin (3:30-4:15pm) with a focus on recent research on Hong Kong writing, involving a dialogue between Dr Jennifer Wong and Prof Gregory Lee, founding Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of St Andrews. This (hybrid) discussion will be informed in part by the Hong Kong-focused special issue of our journal Writing Chinese: A Journal of Contemporary Sinophone Writing, guest edited by Jennifer and published at the end of 2023, with a keynote by Gregory.

After a coffee break there will then be readings (in-person) by each of the three authors, followed by a round-table discussion on the ideas, diverse approaches, and challenges of 'writing Hong Kong' (4:30-5:45 pm).

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).

image by pvproductions

The event will finish with the launch (at 5:45pm) of a new Creative Writing Competition on the theme of "Writing Hong Kong", which is open exclusively to current UK residents who have familial roots or have previously lived in Hong Kong (and who have never published a full length work in English). See our competition page (soon!) for more details of the prizes, the judges, and how to enter.

The event is free but please reserve your place here (with the 'Join the Guestlist' button).

NB: the competition launch, and most of the above event, will be in hybrid format. For online attendance please follow the instructions on the registration page.