Category Archives: Literature festivals

Hong Kong International Literary Festival

March 17, 2026 By in Events, Literature festivals, My books Tags: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments
Two women sitting on chairs in front of a colorful backdrop with the text 'Inspiring Generations'. One woman holds two books, and the other holds a book and a notebook. A small table with two water bottles is in front of them.

Just a week after I returned from the Dibrugarh University International Literature Festival in Assam, India, I jetted off again, this time to take part in the 25th annual Hong Kong International Literary Festival.

My engagements there began with an intense schedule of school visits. Jetlag notwithstanding, I was picked up at 7.15am on my first morning by one of the festival’s brilliant team of volunteers, a committed network of writers and book lovers based in Hong Kong. Over the next three days, I Ubered around Hong Kong Island, delivering ten talks and incomprehension workshops at schools everywhere from the lofty heights of the Peak to Tai Po.

The institutions I visited were a mix of government-funded ‘public’ schools, international schools and English Schools Foundation schools. I was told I might experience quite a difference in response from place to place, particularly as English is a second-language for many students at the public schools.

In truth, though, enthusiasm and sparkiness were evident everywhere. At one girls’ school, where a teacher had warned me the students were often shy, my incomprehension workshop proved a riotous hit, with everything form the Epstein files to six-seven coming into the discussion. At another public school, a teacher who started off sitting to one side couldn’t help jumping up and joining in with great excitement. Afterwards, he told me with emotion that the session had taken him back to his student days and reminded him what he loves about literature.

A flat lay image displaying a thank you certificate addressed to Ann Morgan, a box labeled 'American School Hong Kong', a small notebook with sticky notes, and a gray folder with buttons, all arranged on a table.

As my books are for adults, I never usually do events for primary school children. Consequently, I was rather surprised to arrive at one school and find 60 ten-year-olds waiting for me. Apparently, the pupils there had looked at the speaker brochure and picked me out as someone they particularly wanted to hear from. I adapted my talk accordingly and we had a wonderful session about reading stories from around the world that finished with a forest of hands up to ask questions.

There was a similarly enthusiastic response at the literary festival, at which I did three events. I ran my incomprehension workshop with a small but engaged audience at the very cool Fringe Club. As ever, the discussion generated some mind-blowing responses, showing me new things in stories I have worked with many times before. Several participants shared afterwards that the workshop had allowed them to confront fears and vulnerabilities they had long held about their relationship to reading.

The next day, it was my privilege to chair a panel discussion with three translators at Hong Kong’s Goethe-Institut. Local German-English translator and novelist Nicholas Stephens, Chinese-English translator and novelist Jacqueline Leung and poet Dong Li, who translates between German, French, English and Chinese, shared their insights into their craft. The discussion was wide-ranging and lively, taking in everything from AI to authenticity, and it laid bare the extraordinary humanity and generosity that underpins human translation.

My final event at the festival (pictured at the top) was perhaps the most special of all: a conversation with Jennie Orchard, the editor of The Gifts of Reading for the Next Generation, to which I contributed an essay last year. Jennie was the reason I was in Hong Kong, as she had recommended me to festival director Laura Mannering. She graciously focused the discussion on my new book, and it was a treat to unpack some of the things that have unfolded over the 15 years since I started this blog in her company and in front of a warm and generous audience who bought up every last copy of Relearning to Read in the festival shop. The timing of the event was auspicious too: both our books had just been featured unexpectedly in an article on reading in the UK’s Times Literary Supplement, so it was wonderful to be in conversation in person as well as on the page.

My schedule being rather full, my time for literary exploring at the festival was limited. However, I did manage to attend a really interesting discussion with the Argentine-American writer Hernan Diaz, who spoke about how his career in academia had made him alive to the ‘viscosity’ of language and had very interesting things to say about his perspective on the stories countries tell about themselves: ‘What is a national history but a very hardened cliche?’ I also picked up some great recommendations for Hong Kong writers and was thrilled by an event featuring local authors Ysabelle Cheung, Kaitlin Chan and Karen Cheung talking about writing female experience.

I have a feeling this may prove the source for my next Book of the month. Watch this space…

Sherborne Travel Writing Festival

April 22, 2025 By in Events, Literature festivals, My books Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

I’m not a travel writer. At least, that’s what I’ve always thought. This year, however, I do seem to be spending quite a lot of time speaking, writing and thinking about travel. Not only am I preparing to cover the literary trip of a lifetime for a national newspaper later this summer (watch this space), but I’ve also taken the stage at two travel writing festivals.

The second of these was the Sherborne Travel Writing Festival, which took place earlier this month. Now in its third year, the three-day event in Dorset, UK, is the brainchild of Rory MacLean, who is celebrated for writing genre-busting books about moving across and beyond national borders. His debut, Stalin’s Nose: Across the Face of Europe, was published in 1992 and is still startlingly relevant (and very funny) today.

Much like MacLean’s work, the festival celebrates travel writing in the broadest sense. The traditional formula of the white European reporting on how he finds remote corners of the globe was not much in evidence in this year’s line up. Instead, the programme included an extraordinary range of speakers, from the brilliant Nandini Das, who held the audience captive with a talk on Britain’s first bungling attempts to forge diplomatic relations with the Mughal Empire, to Kapka Kassabova, who spoke movingly of the three months she spent living with Europe’s last moving pastoralists in the mountains of her native Bulgaria while researching her latest book Anima.

I was privileged to take the stage twice. I started off in the interviewee’s chair, spending a wonderful hour talking about Reading the World with journalist and fellow translation champion Rosie Goldsmith (you can see us pictured above). Ten years on from the launch of the first edition of that book, it was a pleasure to reflect back on the journey so far and look forward to the publication of Relearning to Read this September. Goldsmith is one of the best in the business when it comes to chairing literary discussions. If you’re a fan of book podcasts, the Slightly Foxed Podcast, which she hosts, is well worth a listen.

Then it was my turn to ask the questions. I was joined on stage by Xiaolu Guo, who I had the privilege of chairing at Cheltenham Literature Festival last year. An artist who has travelled in many senses (across the world, between languages, between media, through books and across numerous periods of literary history), Guo is a fascinating writer and speaker. We focused on her memoir, My Battle of Hastings, which draws on a year she spent living in the British seaside town of Hastings, where William the Conqueror routed the Anglo-Saxons in 1066. But it was also great to touch on her new novel, Call Me Ishmaelle, a feminist retelling of Moby Dick.

Offstage, there were many similarly fascinating discussions. It was a joy to meet many enthusiastic readers and writers, and a testament to the warm welcome Rory MacLean and his team offer that so many authors from the first two editions of the festival were also in attendance. The weekend was crowned by the announcement of a new annual travel writing prize attached to the festival, the Sherborne Prize for Travel Writing, which will be awarded for the first time next year to a published British or European author whose work encourages understanding between peoples and across societies. Given the breadth and creativity of the team’s vision of travel writing, it’s exciting to think of what this new award might do to broaden the field. And I wonder if in future years the organisers might be persuaded to expand the remit even further to include works published in English from all over the world.

In my experience, there are two kinds of literary festival – those that capitalise on culture and those that nurture it. Sherborne Travel Writing Festival is firmly in the second camp. I left fizzing with ideas and thrilled by new connections. It will be exciting to see where the festival takes us next.

Picture: courtesy of Rosie Goldsmith.

Dibrugarh University International Literature Festival 2025

February 13, 2025 By in Literature festivals, Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

Last week, I got to chair my dream literary festival event panel. It featured Togolese explorer Tété-Michel Kpomassie (my Togolese pick for my original year of reading the world), Bhutanese author and publisher Kunzang Choden (whose The Circle of Karma I also read in 2012), and Bissau-Guinean writer, publisher and engineer Abdulai Silá, whose The Ultimate Tragedy, translated from the Portuguese by Jethro Soutar, was a book of the month of mine a while back.

Not only that, but the event took place in Assam, north-east India, at one of the liveliest and most inspiring gatherings of writers it has ever been my privilege to attend.

This was my second visit to Dibrugarh. The first took place in March 2024, when I was one of the cohort of writers from around the world invited to take part in the inaugural Dibrugarh University International Literature Festival. That event was such a success that the university committed to host a further two editions of the festival. The first of these took place last week.

This time, my involvement in the festival was bigger. Not only was I present as a speaker, but I played a small role in suggesting and inviting some of the other authors in the months leading up to the event. As such, I had the joy of seeing a number of writers whose work I have long admired take the stage in Dibrugarh. They included the Dutch linguist Gaston Dorren, who I met when our debut books came out in 2015; Northern Irish short story writer, novelist and playwright Lucy Caldwell, who I’ve known since we were aspiring authors in our teens; and Uzbek novelist and journalist Hamid Ismailov, who I had the great pleasure of interviewing for my first book, Reading the World.

In addition, the festival brought a number of other intriguing writers onto my radar. With a focus on Africa, the programme included Cameroonian novelist Ernis, Congolese-Norwegian poet and novelist Raïs Neza Boneza and award-winner Joaquim Arena from Cabo Verde.

I chaired several panels with South African writer Shubnum Khan. Her work has only recently become available in the UK, in the form of her engrossing second novel, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, but I was also delighted to have the opportunity to read her essay collection How I Accidentally Became a Global Stock Photo in preparation for our discussion. Funny and illuminating, the book sheds light on the challenges of moving through the world as a Muslim woman. It would appeal to fans of Nanjala Nyabola’s Travelling While Black and ought to be more widely available. UK and US publishers, I’m looking at you.

Having one or two authors from around 20 nations present, alongside a host of wonderful Indian writers, made for an unusually level playing field when it came to discussing international issues. It was powerful to hear perspectives on questions such as the legacy of colonialism and the realities of migration from such a wide range of people and places. I think all of us had our eyes opened over the course of the festival.

The fact that these conversations were so inspiring and frank was also down to the ambience the university and the festival team created. The welcome in Assam is always warm, but this time the organisers went the extra mile. From the student volunteers who showed us around and the banners with author photos lining the campus roads to the delicious food and the world-class Dibrugarh University folk orchestra that played at the closing ceremony, the guests felt celebrated at every turn.

The same held true outside the university. When a group of us ventured out into town, bookshop owner Pradyut Hazarika invited us all for chai. The shop was one of eight branches of Banalata employing 200 staff across Assam, he explained, and the business not only sells but also publishes the Assamese titles it displays. This makes for a personal touch that is often missing in the book industry in other parts of the world.

The personal touch is also at the heart of DUILF. ‘Having established contact with you, you are now close to us in more ways than one and we shall make every effort to make you feel at home,’ wrote curator Rahul Jain in his welcome note to authors.

As we all left Dibrugarh to return to our lives around the world, dispersed like seeds from a pod as Lucy Caldwell put it, I for one certainly felt I was leaving a home from home.