ACWW is a proud sponsor of a session at this year’s Word Vancouver Festival. With a deep vulnerability, Jinwoo Park, K.M. Fajardo, Grace Kwan, and Eddy Boudel Tan offer work that defies genre and expectation. This cross-genre reading brings together memoir, essay, and fiction to explore themes of queerness, diaspora, belonging, and the small absurdities of everyday life. Intimate, inventive, and full of heart.
Authors Jinwoo Park, Oxford Soju Club (Dundurn Press) | Grace Kwan, The Sacred Heart Motel (Metonymy Press) | Eddy Boudel Tan, The Tiger and The Cosmonaut (Penguin Random House Canada). This event will take place at UBC Robson Square, Room C440, on September 20, 2:00-3:00 pm, featuring:
Jinwoo Park is a Korean Canadian writer based in Montreal. Born and raised in Seoul, he has lived in various parts of North America and the UK since the age of 11. He obtained his bachelor’s degree from McGill in 2013, followed by a master’s in political economics from the London School of Economics in 2014, and a master’s in creative writing at the University of Oxford in 2015. In 2021, he won the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers’ Award for his first manuscript, Oxford Soju Club, which Dundurn Press will publish in September 2025. He has also been actively working as a literary translator after winning the Emerging Translator Award from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea in late 2023. He is an editor for Ricepaper Magazine.
Grace Kwan is a Malaysian-born sociologist and writer raised in “Vancouver,” the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations. A Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets nominee, their first full-length book THE SACRED HEART MOTEL, was published by Metonymy Press in November 2024. Find them at grckwn.com or @sleepyfacegrace.
Eddy Boudel Tan has been a finalist for the Edmund White Award, the ReLit Best Novel Award, and the Ferro-Grumley Award for his novels After Elias and The Rebellious Tide. He was named a Rising Star by Writers’ Trust of Canada in 2021. His short stories can be found in Joyland, Yolk, and various literary journals and anthologies. The Tiger and the Cosmonaut is his third novel. He lives in Vancouver with his husband.
Grace Kwan is a Malaysian-born sociologist and writer raised in “Vancouver,” the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations. A Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets nominee, their first full-length book THE SACRED HEART MOTEL, was published by Metonymy Press in November 2024. Find them at grckwn.com or @sleepyfacegrace.
Eddy Boudel Tan has been a finalist for the Edmund White Award, the ReLit Best Novel Award, and the Ferro-Grumley Award for his novels After Elias and The Rebellious Tide. He was named a Rising Star by Writers’ Trust of Canada in 2021. His short stories can be found in Joyland, Yolk, and various literary journals and anthologies. The Tiger and the Cosmonaut is his third novel. He lives in Vancouver with his husband.