Cultural Transnational Identity and the Writer

What does it mean to be an Anglophone writer who is from beyond the centres of Anglophone culture? If you write in English but are not from a primarily monolingual Anglophone world where English is the official or dominant language, what cultural identity do you adopt as “the writer”? In particular, if your concerns, interests and literary content are centred around a transnational life or identity, how does that complicate what you want to write or feel you must write? SLP 2022 English Fiction judge Xu Xi 許素細 will speak about her own experience writing and publishing as a Hong Kong-New York transnational, whose footprints are stamped into both cities. Now that she no longer has a home in her birth city Hong Kong, her cultural identity is further complicated, resulting in new and sometimes unexpected directions for her creative writing.

The talk will be moderated by Max Pasakorn. Max Pasakorn is the author of creative nonfiction chapbook A Study in Our Selves (Neon Hemlock Press, 2023). An alumnus of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Lambda Literary Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ+ writers and Yale-NUS College, Max has previously lived in Singapore, Thailand and the United States. Max’s writing, which sits at the crossroads of queerness, food and popular culture, has won the 2024 swamp pink prize in Nonfiction and the 2022 Chestnut Review Stubborn Writers’ Contest in Poetry.

Admission by donation at $15/pax via Giving.sg
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Photo credit: Paul Hilton

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ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Xu Xi 許素細

XU XI 許素細 is an Indonesian-Chinese native of Hong Kong and author of sixteen books of fiction and nonfiction. She holds the Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts and was also writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa, Arizona State’s Virginia Piper Center, the City University of Hong Kong, among others, and directed two international MFA’s. Now a U.S. citizen she lives between New York and the rest of the world. Find out more about her at www.xuxiwriter.com

Photo Credit: Paul Hilton

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Max Pasakorn

Max Pasakorn is the author of creative nonfiction chapbook A Study in Our Selves (Neon Hemlock Press, 2023). An alumnus of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Lambda Literary Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ+ writers and Yale-NUS College, Max has previously lived in Singapore, Thailand and the United States. Max’s writing, which sits at the crossroads of queerness, food and popular culture, has won the 2024 swamp pink prize in Nonfiction and the 2022 Chestnut Review Stubborn Writers’ Contest in Poetry.