• Sunday, November 15th, 2020
• Discussion 16:00, Close 17:00
• Free Admission; Conducted in Japanese

Li Kotomi is an author, translator, and interpreter from Taiwan, working in Chinese and Japanese. Her first novel written in Japanese Hitorimai (Solo Dance) received the Gunzō New Writer’s Award for Excellence in 2017 and her Chinese translation of the book was also published in Taiwan. In 2019 her novel Itsutsu kazoereba mikazuki ga (Count to Five and the Crescent Moon) was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize. She discusses linguistic hybridity and the journey to writing fiction in your second language, as well as queer/feminist literature with Dr. Grace En-Yi Ting of HKU, who specializes in queer/feminist approaches to Japanese literary and cultural studies.

Li Qinfeng (Li Kotomi) is a biliterate author and translator who writes in Japanese and Chinese. In 2013, she travelled to Japan and thereby settled down. Her Japanese novel Hitorimai (Solo Dance) received the 60th Gunzō New Writer’s Award for Excellence in 2017. She then began writing in both Japanese and Chinese, engaging in creative and translative work. In 2019, her novel Itsutsu kazoereba mikazuki ga (Count to Five and the Crescent Moon. . .) was shortlisted for the 161st Akutagawa Prize.

Grace En-Yi Ting (Ph.D., Yale) is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Hong Kong. She specializes in queer/feminist approaches to Japanese literary and cultural studies, with a focus on women writers. She is working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Minor Intimacies: Queerness, the Normative, and the Everyday in Contemporary Japan, examining femininities and female homosociality within representations of daily life by women writers in post-1980’s Japan. Her second project involves probing tensions between concepts of “queer” and “Asia” across Japanese, Sinophone, and Asian American literary discourses.

Co-Presenter: