In partnership with the Hong Kong Trade Development Council, The British Council is proud to bring the T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poet Sarah Howe to Hong Kong Book Fair 2016 to meet with literature lovers and passionate readers in Hong Kong this summer.
TURNED ALWAYS HOME: IN CONVERSATION WITH SARAH HOWE
Date: Thursday, 21 July 2016
Time: 18.00-19.30
Venue: Room S222-223, Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, 1 Expo Drive, Wanchai
Language: English
Free Entry, please click here for registration
A conversation and reading with the winner of the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize, chaired by Peter Gordon. Sarah Howe will talk about her first book, Loop of Jade, whose poems explore a dual heritage, journeying back to Hong Kong in search of her roots. With extraordinary range and power, the poems build into a meditation on hybridity, intermarriage and love – what meaning we find in the world, in art, and in each other. Crossing the bounds of time, race and language, this is an enthralling exploration of self and place, of migration and inheritance, and introduces an unmistakable new voice in British poetry.
About Sarah Howe
Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize
Winner of The Sunday Times / PFD Young Writer of the Year Award
Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection
Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize for First Full Collection
A 2015 Book of the Year in the TLS, Observer, Independent & New Statesman
'Rich and fierce, Sarah Howe’s poems are alive to the complex stories and voices that cohere around objects, family and place. This is a magnificent collection, surprising and moving in equal measure – I loved it.’ ~ Edmund de Waal
‘A wonderful first collection – it isn’t often you can say exquisite, original, erudite and adventurous all in one breath. Sarah Howe goes to the very heart of her own, her mother’s and China’s recent past.’ ~ Ruth Padel
‘Sarah Howe's soulful poems are as vivid as a river flowing through the Chinese landscape, as alive as mothers calling to their children.’ ~ Xinran
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.
About Peter Gordon (Moderator)
Peter Gordon is editor of the Asian Review of Books. He established the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2006, which he then ran for its first two years. He was a founder and then organizer of the Hong Kong International Literary through 2007. He runs Chameleon Press, a local literary publisher, and has been helping the HKTDC Book Fair with its international authors programme since its inception several years ago.