From September 22 @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm
A reading and discussion with
- Sarah Howe
- Sean Wai Keung
- Fiona Sze-Lorrain
Moderated by Malachi McIntosh, editor of Wasafiri
Having lived through experiences hugely different from that of their parents’, how do these three poets learn to love or claim their sense of place? Malachi—editor of Wasafiri—discuss with the three their multicultural heritage and their experience of place(s), from the food they cook to the people they most miss.
Sarah Howe is a poet, academic and editor. 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 studied for her BA, MPhil and PhD at Christ’s College, Cambridge, spending a year as a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard. Before coming to King’s, she was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at University College London and a Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Previous honours include a Hawthorden Fellowship and the Harper-Wood Studentship for English Poetry, as well as fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation.
Sean Wai Keung is based in Glasgow, Scotland. His work often uses food as a starting point for explorations of identity and migration. His pamphlet ‘you are mistaken’ won the Rialto Open Pamphlet Competition 2016 and he has also released short-length work with Speculative Books. His first full length poetry collection, ‘sikfan glaschu’, was published by Verve Poetry Press in April 2021, and was described as “joyful, earnest and offering unexpected poignancies from everyday life” by The Scotsman. His work has been published in journals including Ambit, SpamZine and Vittles, and he is a poetry editor at EX/POST online.
Fiona Sze-Lorrain writes and translates in English, French, and Chinese. One of the few English-language poets who works across genres and artistic expressions, and with three or more languages/cultures, she is the author of four poetry collections: Water the Moon (2010), My Funeral Gondola (2013), and from Princeton, The Ruined Elegance (2016) and Rain in Plural (2020). Sze-Lorrain has translated more than a dozen volumes of contemporary Chinese-language, French, and American poets, and guest/coedited three anthologies of international literature. She is an editor at Vif Éditions, an independent press in Paris. As a zheng harpist, she has performed worldwide.
