ESEA Lit Fest: On narrative and silence with Khairani Barokka & SJ Kim

Award-winning writers Khairani Barokka and SJ Kim discuss tricks of language and carving art from the spaces between dominant cultures and institutions, in conversation with novelist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo.

Khairani Barokka is a writer and artist from Jakarta, based in London. In 2023, Okka was shortlisted for the Asian Women of Achievement Awards in the Arts and Culture category, and longlisted for the Loewe/Studio Voltaire Award. Her work centres disability justice as anticolonial praxis. Among her honours, she has been a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change, Editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, and Associate Artist at the UK’s National Centre for Writing. Okka is the author of four poetry books, most recently Barbellion Prize-shortlisted Ultimatum Orangutan and Jhalak Prize-longslited amuk. Annah, Infinite is her creative nonfiction debut.

SJ Kim was born in Korea and raised in the American South. She is the author of This Part is Silent, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Her writing on racial, gendered, institutional and political violence has appeared in Wasafiri, Oxford American, TOLKA, and The Hanok Review among other publications. She resides in the UK and teaches creative writing at the University of Warwick.

Xiaolu Guo's novels include A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize), Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, and I Am China. Her memoir Once Upon A Time In The East won the National Book Critics Circle Award 2017 and shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Her nonfiction Radical was published by Vintage 2023, followed by My Battle of Hastings. Her 2025 novel Call Me Ishmaelle is a retelling of Melville’s Moby Dick. Named as a Granta’s Best of Young British Novelist, she also directed a dozen films including the Golden Leopard winner of her feature She, a Chinese and MoMA selection We Went to Wonderland. Guo has been a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York, and a Fischer Professor at the Free University in Berlin. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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