Between Stillness and Language

Between Stillness and Language

A dialogue with creatives from Hong Kong exploring what lies between language, media, identities and memories.

Sarah Howe is a British poet and editor. Her first book, Loop of Jade (Chatto, 2015). She won the T.S. Eliot Prize and The Sunday Times / PFD Young Writer of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

Born in Hong Kong to an English father and Chinese mother, She is the founding editor of Prac Crit, an online journal of poetry and criticism.

Previous honours include a Hawthornden Fellowship and the Harper-Wood Studentship for English Poetry, as well as fellowships from Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She taught poetry and creative writing for many years at King’s College London, before taking up the role of Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus.

About Foretokens

A landmark new collection from T. S. Eliot Prize-winner Sarah Howe, navigating the complex inheritance of family, language and colonialism - and forming a portrait of a mother in search of her past and herself. At the heart is her own mother's clouded past: abandoned as a baby and taken in, at the turbulent dawn of Communist China, by a woman with her own hidden motives. Now a mother herself, Howe finds herself re-examining this unreliable narrative with fresh sight. Sifting through her own history, the poet asks, how can a new generation transform a shattered inheritance? And what is lost and gained in the pursuit?

Wing Lam Tong (湯穎琳) is a writer, comparatist, and lawyer from Hong Kong, currently living in London. Writing in both Chinese and English, her work has appeared in Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, the Asia Art Archive’s IDEAS Journal, The Oxonian Review, and elsewhere. She holds a BA (Literary Studies) and LLB from the University of Hong Kong, and a Master’s in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Oxford. Her research and writing explore womanhood, in-betweenness, senses of belonging, and everyday life. She believes in finding strength in softness.

About Speak Still

Part memoir and part essay, Speak Still confronts colonial silencing by asking out loud: why do non-native speakers of English feel estranged from the English language, despite having known it since childhood? Is it possible for us to own this silence? If so, how can we find our eloquence from our experience of speechlessness? How can we bring the foreign language home?

Jane Lam is a London-based photographer and writer from Hong Kong. She brings a diverse background in literary studies, film, and law to create visual and textural narratives that explore themes of displacement, personal and collective trauma, womanhood, and interspecies relationships.

Her first solo exhibition, Aglaia, was held at Gareth Gardner Gallery in October 2023, as supported by the 2022/23 Architecture Photography Fund. The project was subsequently exhibited at Bermondsey Project Space and The Photobook Cafe in 2024. She was also selected as one of four artist residents at Art Hub Studios in June 2024.

Jane works on photography with text to push the boundaries of visual storytelling, particularly for displacement stories. Combining images and written words, Jane creates thought-provoking and immersive narratives that invite viewers to explore new dimensions of storytelling and gain a deeper understanding of displaced communities.

About Aglaia

is an autobiographical photo project that traces the intertwined histories of an Aglaia odorata tree, four women in Jane’s family, and post-colonial Hong Kong. Connected by a tree gifted to her at birth, which was later left behind when Jane migrated to London after the 2019 protests—the story reflects on inheritance, displacement, and how political shifts ripple through family history.

Combining Kirlian photography, family archives, and images of trees in both Hong Kong and London, Aglaia explores what it means to witness and be witnessed across generations. The Kirlian images, capturing the electrical aura of leaves as they lose moisture in transit, symbolically preserve what remains after being uprooted—echoing the fragility of memory in exile.

Through photography and writing, the project reframes personal and historical events as fleeting moments within the longer lifespan of a tree. In doing so, Aglaia draws out enduring threads of family and heritage, offering a quiet meditation on what survives migration, time, and the shifting political landscape of Hong Kong.

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