Competition

We are delighted to announce the winning entries in our

Bai Meigui Creative Writing Competition:-

1) "A Braided Pulse," by Monica Kam

2) "Night Drive," by Priscilla Yeung

3) "Sick Bed," by Gabrielle Tse

NEW: You can now read all three of our winning entries in our special open access Writing Hong Kong pamphlet. We are grateful to all of our winners for generously allowing us to publish their work. (Copyright remains with the authors).

Each of our three winners also receives a voucher for Arvon Creative Writing Workshops. As ever, due to the number of entries we are unable to provide individual feedback, but our judges have kindly provided some general comments below, and some specific to our three winners.

General Feedback on Entries

Kit: It’s exhilarating to read such a diverse range of poems and short stories that touch upon the multi-faceted Hong Kong lives where collisions of nostalgia and reinvention, capitalism and political impasse, religion and secularism, skyscrapers and remote mountains are the bread and butter of thriving and surviving in the city. This competition shows us the peculiar intimacies and scarring memories from a city of great transformation and unstoppable creativity.

Karen: It was wonderful to read so many quality entries from writers who have called Hong Kong home – and from those who have never published, too! It shows the breadth of stories that are possible from this place, and I hope all the contestants will continue to write moving forward.

Jennifer: I am truly impressed by the sheer range of thematic concerns and craftsmanship in these entries for an inaugural competition, and which goes far beyond the surface. From reading these entries, I can appreciate how impressions and narratives inspired by Hong Kong can take so many different directions, and that the creative exploration of form, voice, literary devices can truly heighten or deepen the meaning in each piece of work. It is exciting to see so many promising voices and catch a glimpse of their psyche!

Judges' comments on "A Braided Pulse"

Evocative, elegiac and lyrical, this is a poetic narrative that explores the unfamiliar, mythical mind-scape of an acupuncture doctor, who witnesses the pain of his patients and experiences his own. In the story, memories return to haunt the mind, while the daily rituals of living and healing take place. Language is often inadequate in capturing what they feel and lived through, while the living continue to look for a cure.

Judges' comments on "Night Drive"

With a wonderful eye for detail – from “futuristic purple lights” to army-like street lamps – the story transports the reader and places them firmly within the city’s nightscape. It’s an effective (and affective) rumination on the stifling go-getter mentality of capitalist Hong Kong instilled upon one from a young age. The prose was authoritative and self-assured, such that even when the writer leans upon much-used descriptors like “concrete jungle”, it never feels cliched – which is hard to pull off! Also enjoyed the myriad of international art and literature references in the text.

Judges' comments on "Sick Bed"

Anchoring itself in a luna-tidal movement of sickness and medicine, the poem sways in a bitter wakefulness and transports us to an ambiguous state of mind where nothingness is as skin-deep as our memory of childhood.

More information about the competition below

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.

Image by J Wong

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, the diversity of approaches, and challenges. (The Youtube link to these will be available shortly.) Also read our blog interview with editors of Where Else: an International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology and the special issue of our Journal.

Word count

Poetry: up to 50 lines per poem

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

Launch and Closing date

The extended deadline is midnight (UK time) on 31st July 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 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 September 2024. Winning entrants may 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 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 31st July 2024 (closes midnight UK time).

Good luck!