The Hong Kong International Literary Festival (HKILF) returns this year from 5th to 15th November with the focus on themes of resilience, recovery and mental health, with an emphasis on new fiction and the joy of reading.
Goethe-Institut Hongkong is pleased to continue the collaboration with HKILF in presenting another strange and wondrous attempt by the German writer/book designer Judith Schalansky to evoke the unknown. Each chapter in An Inventory of Losses follows the convention of a different genre and reveals insights from the fragmentary remains of unique things and places that have lost to time – the paradisal island of Tuanaki, the Caspian Tiger, Sappho’s love poems, Greta Garbo’s fading beauty, a painting by Caspar David Friedrich or the former East Germany’s Palace of the Republic.
To be moderated by Julia Kuehn, a Professor of English Literature at the University of Hong Kong, the conversation will focus on Judith Schalansky’s inventive approach to the recurring topics of loss and disappearance, remembrance and forgetting.
