Join Carla Montemayor and Natalie Gregory ​as they trace ​their underrepresented histories of Southeast Asia, with journalist Suyin Haynes

Carla Montemayor is a writer originally from the Philippines, now based in London. She won a London Writers Award for narrative nonfiction in 2021 and was a fellow on the London Library Emerging Writers Programme 2022-23. Her writing has been shortlisted for Spread the Word’s Life Writing Award (2020), and the Specimen Press competition To Speak England in Different Languages (2021). She has contributed work to acclaimed food writing anthology London Feeds Itself (2022), and her essay ‘The Shapeshifters’ in Hinterland Magazine was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2021.

Natalie Gregory, like her protagonist, had a Thai mother. It was the accidental disposal of Natalie’s mother’s recipes, shortly after her mother passed away, which eventually inspired the novel’s inciting incident. With a BA in English and History and an MSc in International Politics, Natalie has made a career out of writing for others, including as a speechwriter, but her passion has always been fiction. Her short story, ‘A Bowl of Soup’ , was published in Together in the UK’s anthology, Hear our Stories by Victorina Press in August 2023. This story also won the Creative Writing NZ flash fiction competition and was shortlisted for the Exeter Short Story Prize. Natalie lives in Buckinghamshire.

Suyin Haynes is a Malaysian British writer and researcher based in London, focused on storytelling at the intersections of identity, culture and underrepresented communities. Her writing has featured in The New York Times, Jacobin, Al Jazeera and more, and she has programmed film events focused on Southeast Asian cinema in partnership with the Barbican, BFI, Brixton Community Cinema and others.

Venue: Level 6 Auditorium, Foyles, 107 Charing Cross Road, WC2H 0EB*

*Please note the Level 6 Auditorium is fully accessible via the lifts.

Description supplied by the event organiser.