Where Else: An International Hong Kong Anthology Reading

To celebrate the launch of Where Else: An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology, published by Verve Poetry Press,  and in partnership with Verve, and with the University of Leeds Poetry Centre, we’re delighted to be joined by the collection’s editors, and by some of the featured poets.

This will be a hybrid event, with some speakers joining us in Leeds, and some joining online. The speakers will be: Sarah Howe, Kit Fan, Tim Tim Cheng, Felix Chow, Jason E.H.Lee, and Jennifer Wong.

Featuring both established and emerging Hong Kong poets across generations and continents, this unique anthology offers a glimpse into an exciting, diverse range of voices that make up the diasporic imagination of the contemporary Hong Kong poetry community. Adopting a diasporic approach, the anthology encompasses both native Hong Kong writers as well as expatriate and mixed-race voices who were born or have lived in the city.

These are the people’s poems: Filling our hearts and minds with empires past and dreamscapes of the present:  Cantonese opera wafting through windows, the buzz of taxis and street hawkers, landmark pagodas, magical star ferry rides and endless kettles of chrysanthemum tea, dim sum and noodle shops. 

Refreshments provided, and there’ll be a bookstall from Truman Books where you’ll be able to buy the anthology, as well as other poetry collections. Tickets are free, and all welcome, but please reserve your place through our Eventbrite page.

Featured poets:

Tim Tim Cheng: is a poet and teacher from Hong Kong, currently based between Edinburgh and London. Her pamphlet Tapping at Glass is out with Verve in 2023. She is also a William Hunter Sharpe Memorial Scholarship awardee, WRiCE fellow, Roddy Lumsden Memorial Mentorship mentee, and a member of the Southbank Centre New Poets Collective. 

Felix Chow is an MPhil student at the University of Hong Kong. He double-majored in English Studies and Hong Kong Studies at HKU, achieving first-class honours.His poems are published in The Lincoln Review, Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine and Cha: Asian Literary Journal. He is a co-organizer of OutLoud HK, Hong Kong’s longest-running English poetry collective. Forever a HongKonger. 

Kit Fan’s third poetry collection The Ink Cloud Reader was published by Carcanet in April 2023. He is the author of two books of poems, As Slow As Possible (2018) and Paper Scissors Stone (2011). His debut novel is Diamond Hill (2021). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022. 

Sarah Howe is a Hong Kong-born poet, academic and editor, and now lives in London. Her first book Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015) won the T.S. Eliot Prize and The Sunday Times / PFD Young Writer of the Year Award. She teaches poetry at King’s College London. 

Jason EH Lee: Jason Eng Hun Lee is a poet and academic of mixed British and Malaysian Chinese ancestry. His debut poetry collection Beds in the East was a finalist for the HKU Poetry Prize and Melita Hume Poetry Prize. He is a Literary Editor for Postcolonial Text and chief curator for OutLoud HK (隨言香港). He is a Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at Hong Kong Baptist University. 

Jennifer Wong: is a poet, writer, researcher and translator. She is a visiting fellow at Oxford TORCH for 2022 and the writer-in-residence for Wasafiri in 2021. Her collection, 回家 Letters Home (Nine Arches Press 2020). Her monograph, Identity, Home and Writing Elsewhere in Contemporary Chinese Diaspora Poetry, is published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2023. 

Admission is FREE.

Please book your tickets on Eventbrite.