Cecile Pin, Xialou Guo and John Lau discuss writing into epic spaces. In today's literary landscape, who gets to be so ambitious?

Acclaimed writers Cecile Pin and Xialou Guo discuss writing into epic spaces: whether that’s outer space or the space of a well-loved classic. They’ll be in conversation with video game designer and producer John Lau.

Cecile Pin is a London-based writer. Her debut novel Wandering Souls was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Prix Femina Etranger, and shortlisted for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize. She has won the Fragonard Prize for Foreign Literature, a Somerset Maugham Award, and a London Writers' Award. In 2025, she was selected as one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Europe.

Xiaolu Guo's novels include A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize), Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, and I Am China. Her memoir Once Upon A Time In The East won the National Book Critics Circle Award 2017 and shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Her nonfiction Radical was published by Vintage 2023, followed by My Battle of Hastings. Her 2025 novel Call Me Ishmaelle is a retelling of Melville’s Moby Dick. Named as a Granta’s Best of Young British Novelist, she also directed a dozen films including the Golden Leopard winner of her feature She, a Chinese and MoMA selection We Went to Wonderland. Guo has been a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York, and a Fischer Professor at the Free University in Berlin. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

John Lau is Lead Producer at ustwo games, the South London-based studio behind the smash hit Monument Valley games, which are now available on Netflix.

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

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

Description supplied by the event organiser.