Tuesday July 8, 2025
7PM
Belle Ling was born and raised in Hong Kong. Her poems have won numerous international awards, including the Playa Residency’s Fellowship in Oregon (2014), the UK's Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition (Second Place in the ESL Category, 2016), the New York State Summer Writers Institute Scholarship (2017), the Hong Kong’s International Proverse Poetry Prize Anthology Place Award (2018), and the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award in UK (Shortlist, 2022). She was also a Co-Winner of the Australian Book Review’s prestigious Peter Porter Poetry Prize (2018). Her poetry manuscript, Rabbit-Light, was Highly Commended for the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and her other poetry collection, Grass Flower Head, was shortlisted for The Puncher & Wattmann Prize for a First Book of Poetry. She has been an invited author at the Brisbane Writers Festival, the Hong Kong International Literary Festival, the Goethe-Institut Hongkong, the New York’s Mongrel Writers Residence, and the Chinese Diaspora Poetry Festival in the UK. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from The University of Queensland and a Master of Creative Writing from The University of Sydney. She is now serving in the Core Team of Guild Hong Kong to mobilize strategic creative industry partnerships.
Nebulous Vertigo:
Formally daring poems that ask a compelling question: if fate can never be changed, how can we embrace its weaving?
The realm that belongs to Nebulous Vertigo is both visceral and vibrant, and it is mysteriously familiar. If you come close to it, you will hear how rains eat, how a silken tofu revolts, how the Chinese word for “beans” turns into a speaking persona, and how a telephone bridges the surviving and the afterlife. In Nebulous Vertigo, everyday life is inevitably lost to the inevitable fate. And yet, with unexpected quivers, our fate and life keep surprising us.
Traveling through the cha chaan teng in Hong Kong, you can hear how Mrs. Suen, Mr. Yuen, and Waiter Kuen carry out intriguing conversations; astounded by the night sky in Paris, you will see how constellations narrate the lovers’ quirky destiny; and all the way through the Sayama Hills in Tokorozawa, you will be surprised by the turnings and upturnings of the myths told by a Japanese Uncle. Nebulous Vertigo, as its title beckons, “sighs an unreal cloud / for the fated sun to rise.” If fate can never be changed, how can we embrace its weaving? Every attempt, as the poems suggest, can be calmingly adventurous, unobvious yet magnanimous.
