TALK | Old Soul: A Haunting Thriller

Speaker: Susan Barker

Moderator: Margarita Oganyan

Date: March 8, Sun

Time: 3:30pm - 4:30pm

Venue: Fringe Club - Fringe Underground

Address: Fringe Club, 2 Lower Albert Road, Central, Hong Kong

Price: HKD168

Language: English

Format: Talk

Description: In Old Soul, Susan Barker explores memory, obsession, and the unsettling persistence of the past in a world shaped by movement and desire. Blending psychological intensity with speculative unease, the novel travels across borders and time, tracing characters haunted by histories they cannot escape. In this author talk, Barker discusses the ideas behind Old Soul, her approach to atmosphere, voice, and form, and how questions of inheritance, identity, and survival thread through her work. She reflects on writing global settings, cultivating tension, and allowing ambiguity to do its work on the page. This conversation invites readers into a dark, hypnotic vision of contemporary life, where the past is never finished, and the future feels quietly unstable — and profoundly human stories.

About the Speaker:

Susan Barker

Susan Barker is the author of four books. Her third novel, The Incarnations (2015), was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and Notable Book, a Kirkus Reviews’ Top Ten Book of the Year, was shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, winner of a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize and a Waterstones Bookclub pick. An excerpt from Old Soul (2025) won a Northern Writers’ Award for Fiction in 2020, as well as funding from Arts Council England and The Society of Authors. Susan currently lives in Manchester, where she is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.

*This event is presented with the support of the International Writers’ Workshop at Hong Kong Baptist University.

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•⁠ 3rd March (Tue): On Muscle: The Stuff that Moves Us and Why It Matters (7:00-8:30pm)

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ABOUT HKILF

The Hong Kong International Literary Festival (HKILF) inspires the joy of reading by bringing the world’s writers and stories to Hong Kong’s diverse communities. A dynamic year-round programme and an annual festival offer dialogue, entertainment and perspective, while the Young Readers Festival (YRF) motivates students to engage with all aspects of the written word, improving communication skills, while nurturing the art of writing and storytelling.

The annual festival features established and emerging writers from around the world, alongside local literary talents, in a programme that includes panel discussions, book talks, readings, workshops, walks, school programmes, performances, and more.

We are a registered charity non-profit organisation dedicated to bringing the best in the literary arts to Hong Kong. To find more, please visit our official website: https://www.festival.org.hk.

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