The UK’s award-winning East and South East Asian literary festival returns to Foyles Charing Cross Road on Saturday 20 September 2025 for a day of conversation, workshops, book signings and a lunchtime bake sale hosted by Polly Chan’s Bakehouse fundraising for Sesame Organisation.
Featured in the Guardian, Harper’s Bazaar and Elle, ESEA Lit Fest is a joyful, thought-provoking celebration of East and South East Asian literature and culture that’s open to all. Launched in 2023 by Maria Garbutt-Lucero and Joanna Lee, co-founders of the ESEA Publishing Network, in partnership with Foyles, it sold out two years in a row and has become an essential fixture in the UK literary events calendar, with events at the Southbank Centre, Edinburgh International Book Festival and The Times & Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival throughout 2025. Previous speakers include Pio Abad, Romalyn Ante, Tash Aw, Susan Barker, Tania Branigan, Kaliane Bradley, Troy Cabida, Elaine Castillo, Jeremy Chan, Catherine Cho, Will Harris, Helena Lee, Rebecca Liu, Thuận, Zing Tsjeng and Mandy Yin.
ESEA Lit Fest at Foyles is presented in partnership with the Bagri Foundation and supported by Hachette UK and their employee network THRIVE.
The following two sessions are of Korean / Korean diaspora interest:
Sleight of Hand: On narrative and silence with Khairani Barokka & SJ Kim in conversation with Xiaolu Guo
11am – 12noon | £5 – £8 | Book here
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.
Worth It? On ambition and expectation with Nicola Dinan & Juhea Kim chaired by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
12:30 – 1:30pm | £5 – £8 | Book here
Join acclaimed novelists Nicola Dinan and Juhea Kim to discuss the cost of ambition, what it means to succeed, and the expectations that we hold for ourselves and others with novelist Rowan Hisayo Buchanan. Is it ever, really, worth it?
Nicola Dinan grew up in Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur and now lives in London. Bellies, her debut, won the Polari First Book Prize, was shortlisted for the Diverse Book Awards and Mo Siewcharran Prize, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, and was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize. Her second book, Disappoint Me, was released to great acclaim ealrier this year.
Juhea Kim is the author of the international bestseller Beasts of a Little Land, which has been published around the world. It won the Yasnaya Polyana Award and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and is currently being adapted into a television series. Kim’s second novel, City of Night Birds, was published in January 2025. Kim earned her BA in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University. Her writing has been published in Granta, Times Literary Supplement, Independent, Zyzzyva, Guernica and elsewhere. Born in South Korea and raised in Portland, Oregon, Kim now lives in London.
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is the author of Harmless Like You, Starling Days, and The Sleep Watcher. Rowan is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She has won The Authors’ Club First Novel Award and a Betty Trask Award and has been shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award. Her short work has appeared in several places including Granta, Guernica, The Guardian, The Harvard Review, and NPR’s Selected Shorts. She is the editor of the Go Home! and Dog Hearted anthologies.