From October 3 @ 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Moderator: Cosima Bruno, SOAS
- Mary Jean Chan
- Nina Mingya Powles
- Theo Kwek
How do poets translate and articulate themselves as bilinguals? How do they rediscover their authentic inner selves and reveal—with profound and moving honesty—their cultural and emotional journeys through the power of poetic language?
Mary Jean Chan is the author of Flèche, published by Faber & Faber (2019). Flèche won the 2019 Costa Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted in 2020 for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the Jhalak Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize. Chan is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Oxford Brookes University and a supervisor on the MSt in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford. She is a contributing editor at Oxford Poetry and will be a Writer-in-Residence at the Nanyang Technological University School of Humanities in Singapore in 2022.
Theophilus Kwek is a writer and researcher based in Singapore. He has published five volumes of poetry, most recently Moving House (Carcanet Press, 2020). His poems, translations and essays have appeared in The Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, The London Magazine, Mekong Review and elsewhere, and two of his books were shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize. He has also written widely on issues of citizenship and migration, for the South China Morning Post, Straits Times, Singapore Policy Journal and other platforms. He currently serves as poetry editor at the Asian Books Blog.
Nina Mingya Powles is a zinemaker, poet and essayist from Aotearoa, New Zealand of Malaysian-Chinese ancestry, currently living in London. Her debut poetry collection Magnolia 木蘭 was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Book of Poetry in 2020. She is the founding editor of Bitter Melon, publishing handmade poetry pamphlets by Asian poets, and is Digital Editor of Wasafiri magazine. In 2019 she won the Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing; her resulting collection of essays Small Bodies of Water is published by Canongate in August 2021.
