Dinan, Aw and Cho to appear at inaugural ESEA Lit Fest

Nicola Dinan, Tash Aw and Catherine Cho are part of the line-up for the inaugural ESEA Lit Fest, the first UK literary festival dedicated to East and Southeast Asian literature launched by the ESEA Publishing Network in partnership with Foyles. 

Dinan, author of Bellies (Doubleday), will be in conversation with Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of Gay Bar (Granta) and Sharlene Teo, the author behind Ponti (Picador) to consider the tropes used to represent love and sexuality in writing of and about ESEA cultures, unpicking the politics of romantic preference and the ways Asian identity is fetishised in the language of desire. 

Aw, longlisted for the Booker Prize for Five Star Billionaire (Fourth Estate) will unpack the politics of representation with academic, novelist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo and Zing Tsjeng, the editor in chief of VICE and the author of the Forgotten Women book series (Brazen). 

Cho, author of Inferno (Bloomsbury Circus) and founder of Paper Literary Agency, will be in conversation with Tania Branigan, author of Red Memory (Faber) and foreign leader writer at the Guardian and novelist André Dao, author of Anam (Picador) to discuss how we remember the past, literary inheritance and political history in writing from the diaspora. 

The festival, which coincides with the UK’s fourth ESEA Heritage Month, will take place at Foyles’ flagship Charing Cross branch on 23rd September 2023 and is sponsored by Hachette UK and its employee network THRIVE, Curtis Brown and the C&W Agency.  

The festival will also include poetry readings and workshops. Full details and tickets can be found here.

Maria Garbutt-Lucero, festival co-founder, said: “We’ve been delighted that a dedicated community has come together for ESEA Publishing Network events and that these have grown exponentially — from 100 people at our launch in September to 200 at our summer party in June. Curating this festival with Foyles is the natural next step in our aim to celebrate literature from East and Southeast Asian authors. This has been a wonderful collaboration with Harry, Gavin and Jenny [who are in the events and comms teams] at Foyles, who have been absolute champions throughout, thinking ambitiously and creatively about how we can make this the best launch possible for the inaugural ESEA Lit Fest. I personally can’t wait to hear this stellar line-up of acclaimed authors talking about everything from the language of desire to the limits of authenticity in food writing, and interrogating the politics of representation.”