Join Wasafiri for a poetry reading and panel discussion on dislocation and diaspora with Theophilus Kwek – who will read from his latest collection, Commonwealth (Carcanet, May 2025) – and Suji Kwock Kim, author of Notes from the Divided Country. The evening will be chaired by Wasafiri Associate Editor and poet Jennifer Wong.
The three poets will consider questions around borders, community, belonging, and movement. Magazines from across the Wasafiri archive will be available for purchase on the night.
Theophilus Kwek has been shortlisted twice for the Singapore Literature Prize. He is the youngest recipient of the Cikada Prize, for poetry that “defends the inviolability of life”, and part of the Forbes 30 Under 30 Class of 2024. His latest book is Commonwealth (Carcanet Press, 2025).
Suji Kwock Kim is author of Notes from the Divided Country, which received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Bay Area Book Reviewers/ Northern California Book Award. Her other works include Private Property, Notes from the North, and Disorient: Fugues & Assimilamentations. A dual U.K./U.S. citizen, she’s currently a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, and a Trustee for the U.K. Charity Commission and CNK (formerly the European Alliance for Human Rights in North Korea), based in New Malden, Surrey, home to the largest community of North Korean refugees in the world outside Asia.
Jennifer Wong is the author of 回家 Letters Home (Nine Arches Press, 2020). She has a PhD in creative writing from Oxford Brookes University where she works as an associate lecturer.