The new Korean director of the city's biggest literary event can attract star power to town, but she has even bigger ambitions
“I was pinching myself; ‘is this real?’” says Soo Jung Hyun as she recalls the late Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney speaking at the 2006 Hong Kong International Literary Festival (HKILF), an event she’d been involved in organising. “Being able to be part of his visit was unreal.
This feeling would well up again 16 years later in April 2022, when Hyun was appointed executive director of the festival, 15 years after she last worked there. Over a video call with Tatler in December 2022, her elation was palpable as she spoke about the 2023 festival featuring Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka, who won the 2022 Booker Prize for his work The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. This is the second Booker Prize winner to attend in recent years; South African writer Damon Galgut attended the festival virtually in 2021. This year will also see National Book Award finalist Emily St John Mandel, whose work Station Eleven was adapted into an HBO Max series, in attendance.
But the new HKILF director, a Hong Kong-raised Korean, isn’t only focused on bringing global industry stars to the city, particularly this year, with a festival theme of Celebrating. “Hong Kong is the heart of that: we want to celebrate the city opening up and passion projects about Hong Kong,” she says. “Traditionally the festival is very strong in terms of literary names, but what I’m very keen to do is to broaden the types of speakers we bring.” Since her appointment, Hyun and her two core teammates, Malaysian writer Maureen Tai and author and teacher Laura Mannering, have been frequenting the Hong Kong sections of bookshops, speaking to readers and searching social media for “local people and groups with passion projects, large or small, about Hong Kong which they have turned into books”.
In December, at the time of writing, half of the 70 featured writers on the line-up were Hong Kong-based or of Asian heritage. “We want to champion voices in Asia writing in English, which is becoming its own genre, as opposed to Asian American writing or British Asian writing,” Hyun says. As well as Karunatilaka, who will be featured in the Hildebrandt Fiction Series, one of the festival’s marquee event for adults that profiles international fiction writers, Hyun, HKILF’s co-chair Jo Lusby, Tai and Mannering have also come up with sharing sessions with Hong Kong-based writers including fiction writer and playwright Dung Kai-cheung; Matt Abergel, chef and co-owner of Yardbird, whose cookbook Chicken and Charcoal won a prestigious James Beard Foundation Award; and former Legco counsellor and chief development strategist at the HKUST Institute for the Environment Christine Loh with her new work How Covid Took Over The World: Lessons for the Future.
