Event details

Writers at York is delighted to welcome acclaimed authors Kit Fan and Ellen Wiles in conversation with Alice Nah about their debut novels. Both narratives explore themes of displacement, identity, loss and power/powerlessness. Join us to celebrate the publication of Kit Fan’s Diamond Hill, and discuss the influences that helped shape both writers’ work, their journeys to publication, and their experiences of writing across different mediums. 

Kit Fan is a novelist, poet, and critic. Diamond Hill, his debut novel about Hong Kong, is published by Dialogue Books and World Editions in May 2021. His second poetry collection, As Slow As Possible was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and one of the Irish Times Books of the Year. He was shortlisted twice for the Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize, and a winner of a Northern Writers Award, Times Stephen Spender Poetry Translation Prize, and POETRY’s Editors Prize for Reviewing. www.kitfan.net | twitter: @Kit_Fan_ | Insta: kit_fan_

Ellen Wiles is a novelist, anthropologist, curator, and lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Exeter. Her debut novel The Invisible Crowd (HQ, 2017) was awarded a Victor Turner Prize. She is also the author of Saffron Shadows and Salvaged Scripts: Literary Life in Myanmar Under Censorship and in Transition (Columbia University Press, 2015) and Live Literature: The Experience and Cultural Value of Literary Performance Events from Salons to Festivals (Palgrave, 2021). She has previously worked as a human rights barrister and a busker. www.ellenwiles.com

Alice M. Nah is a senior lecturer at the Centre for Applied Human Rights and the Department of Politics at the University of York. She conducts research on the security and protection of human rights defenders at risk and asylum and migration in Asia. Her research projects have involved working collaboratively with artists to create, imagine, and tell stories in ways that inspire action and reflection. Her recent edited book Protecting Human Rights Defenders at Risk, published by Routledge in 2020, proposes ways in which the protection of human rights defenders at risk should be reimagined and practised.

This event is jointly hosted by Writers at York and the University of Sanctuary.

You can order signed copies of Diamond Hill and The Invisible Crowd from Fox Lane Books.