GLOBAL SCRIBES: LITERARY FICTION ACROSS DIVIDES

Krys Lee, Kaitlin Solimine, Xu Xi, Andy Killeen

Sunday, March 25, 2 pm | 60 RMB 

In this panel, we bring you three prolific and talented writers whose working and writing lives have straddled continents. Joining us will be Krys Lee (How I Became a North Korean), a Korean-American who is now working in Seoul; Kaitlin Solimine (Empire of Glass), who now lives back in her native US but has spent extended time in China and Singapore; and Xu Xi (That Man in Our Lives), an Indonesian-Chinese Hong Kong native and US citizen. They will read some of their writing, and discuss identity, globalization and transnationalism and to what extent they feed into their own work. In conversation with Andy Killeen.

Krys Lee is the author of the short story collection Drifting House and the recent debut novel How I Became a North Korean, both published by Viking, Penguin Random House. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize and the Story Prize Spotlight Award, the Honor Title in Adult Fiction Literature from the Asian/Pacific American Libraries Association, and finalist for Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the BBC International Story Prize. Her fiction, journalism, and literary translations have appeared in Granta, The Kenyon Review, Narrative, San Francisco Chronicle, Corriere della Sera, and The Guardian, among others. She is an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at Yonsei University, Underwood International College, in South Korea.

Kaitlin Solimine has lived off and on in China since 1996. She has been a Harvard-Yenching Scholar at Beijing University, a U.S. Department of State Fulbright Creative Fellow in China, and received several scholarships, awards, and residencies for her writing, including the 2012 Dzanc Books/Disquiet International Literary Program award judged by Colson Whitehead. Her fiction and non-fiction has been published in National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, Guernica Magazine, Kartika Review, The Huffington Post, The World of Chinese Magazine, China Daily, and numerous anthologies. Kaitlin is co-founder of Hippo Reads, a network connecting academic insights and scholars to the wider public. She resides in San Francisco with her husband and daughter. Empire of Glass was named a finalist for the 2017 Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize, a prize previously awarded to works by Junot Diaz and Viet Nguyen. http://kaitlinsolimine.com

Xu Xi is author of twelve books, most recently a memoir Dear Hong Kong: An Elegy for a City (Penguin, 2017), the novel That Man in Our Lives (C&R Press, 2016) Interruptions (Hong Kong Univ. Museum & Art Gallery/Columbia Univ. Press, 2016), a collaborative ekphrastic essay collection with photography by David Clarke. She is co-founder of Authors at Large and fiction editor at Tupelo Press in Massachusetts. In 2018, she was named Faculty Co-Director of a new, low-residency International MFA in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier.  An Indonesian-Chinese Hong Kong native and U.S. citizen, she currently lives between New York and Hong Kong. @xuxiwriter

Andrew Killeen is a writer, editor and creative writing teacher. Originally from Birmingham, UK, he studied at Cambridge University and now lives in Beijing, where he works as a Senior Editor at True Run Media. In between he has been a DJ, literary festival organizer and homeless support worker. He writes a regular humorous column for the Beijinger and has also written opinion pieces for Global Times. His travel book Bright Like a Mirror: Jiangxi Province and the Shaping of China will be published by Wandering China in 2018, and his critically acclaimed historical novels are published by Dedalus Books (London).