An evening with writer and scholar SJ Kim on her magnificent creative-critical exploration of diasporic experience in & against institutions and their silences, *This Part is Silent: A Life Between Cultures* (And Other Stories). In conversation with the University of Bristol's Prof Madhu Krishnan. In *This Part Is Silent* (longlisted for the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and for the 2026 Gordon Burn Prize), SJ Kim probes her experiences as a writer, scholar, and daughter to confront the silences she finds in the world. With curiosity and sensitivity, she writes letters to the institutions that simultaneously support and fail her, intimate accounts of immigration, and interrogations of rising anti-Black and anti-Asian racism. She considers the silences between generations―especially within the Asian diaspora in the West―as she finds her way back to her own family during the pandemic lockdown. Embracing the possibilities and impossibilities of language, Kim rejoices in the similes of Korean, her mother tongue, and draws inspiration from K-dramas and writers who sustain her, including Yusef Komunyakaa, Don Mee Choi, Toni Morrison, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. SJ Kim was born in Korea and raised in the American South. Her writing on racial, gendered, institutional and political violence has appeared in Wasafiri, Oxford American, and The Hanok Review among other publications. She resides in the UK and teaches creative writing at the University of Warwick. Madhu Krishnan is Professor of African, World and Comparative Literatures in the Department of English at the University of Bristol and Director of the Centre for Black Humanities. She is the author of *Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications* (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), *Writing Spatiality in West Africa: Colonial Legacies in the Anglophone/Francophone Novel* (Boydell & Brewer, 2018) and *Contingent Canons: African Literature and the Politics of Location* (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Entry requirements: no age restrictions (under 18s to be accompanied by an adult over 21yrs, 1:1 ratio) — Read more — Read less