Sat Sep 16 2023 at 04:00 pm to 06:00 pm

Asymmetry HQ, 102a, Albion Drive, London, United Kingdom

A letter, a line, a passage: a sea of syllables shores up bodies dreamt, dreams remembered, of places foreign yet familiar, always already lost yet impossible to forget. Libraries are where literature-bodies go to rest only to live on forever, time and again, from the lingering finger to the moving lips.

To conclude the 2023 Librarian-in-Residence programme, we welcome three writers — Minying Huang (poet, Oxford), Travis Jeppesen (novelist, Berlin), and Eric Yip (poet, Cambridge) — to the Asymmetry HQ for an afternoon reading of recent and unpublished works. In tones ranging from the confessional to the observant, by intervals sardonic and devastating, they are united by a queer zest for the ephemeral, the not-yet and the in-between.

The event is convened by our librarian-in-residence Alvin Li, who will have a conversation with our guests after their reading.

Minying Huang is a poet, writer, and doctoral student in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford. A former Barbican Young Poet, their work appears in fourteen poems, wildness, Palette Poetry, Foglifter, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. In 2021, they were shortlisted for the inaugural James Berry Poetry Prize. They grew up in Cambridge, UK.

Travis Jeppesen is the author of numerous books, including Wolf at the Door, All Fall: Two Novellas, The Suiciders, See You Again in Pyongyang, and Bad Writing. His calligraphic and text-based art work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Wilkinson Gallery (London), Exile (Berlin), and Rupert (Vilnius), and featured in group exhibitions internationally. In April 2023, his play Ghosts of the Landwehr Canal was premiered at Berliner Ringtheater under the direction of Ping-Hsiang Wang, and in November 2023, Itna Press will publish Jeppesen’s latest novel, Settlers Landing.

Eric Yip has published his poems in The Poetry Review, Magma, The Adroit Journal, and Best New Poets. He won the 2021 National Poetry Competition and was shortlisted for the 2023 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – Written. He was a Poetry Society Young Critic with reviews forthcoming in Poetry London and Magma and is a co-host of Ying Si Hak Yi, a Cantonese podcast on global Anglophone poetry. He has performed his work at venues including St Paul’s Cathedral, The Common Press, Verve Poetry Festival, and BBC Radio 4. He was born and raised in Hong Kong and is currently based in Cambridge, UK, where he studies.

Free tickets can be booked here.