Imagined Places

Evening discussion with poet, T.S Eliot prize winner & recipient of The Sunday Times/PFD Young Writer of the Year Award, Sarah Howe and Hong Kong Writer, Melanie Ho

Drinks Reception 18:30
Discussion 19:00
Close 20:00

In her poem ‘Questions of Travel‘, the American poet Elizabeth Bishop asked, ‘Is it lack of imagination that makes us come / to imagined places, not just stay at home?’ At this moment in time, when exile, migration and where we belong are urgent political questions, how might poetry open our eyes to other ways of seeing the world? The poet is ‘always in a foreign country’, the French-Jewish-Egyptian poet Edmond Jabès once said he ‘uses poetry as an interpreter.’ In this reading and conversation, Hong Kong-born British poet Sarah Howe will talk about poetry as a potential interpreter of migrant experience, when writing in the space between countries, cultures and races.

Sarah Howe is a British poet, academic and editor. Born in Hong Kong to an English father and Chinese mother, she moved to England as a child. 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, and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize and Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her pamphlet, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia (Tall-lighthouse, 2009), won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. Her poems have appeared in journals including Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Guardian, The Financial Times, Ploughshares and Poetry, as well as anthologies such as Ten: The New Wave and four editions of The Best British Poetry. She has performed her work at festivals internationally and on BBC Radio 3 & 4. She is the founding editor of Prac Crit, an online journal of poetry and criticism. (Photo credit: Hayley Madden)

Melanie Ho is a writer in Hong Kong. A former journalist, she is a Masters student in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford. (Moderator)

Sarah Howe will be available for a book signing after the discussion.

HK$$200 Asia Society members/ British Council staffs;
HK$300 Non-members