Dr Antony Huen, Research Assistant Professor in the School of Arts and Social Sciences, has received another award for his scholarly work. His critical essay on the works of British women poets has recently been awarded a silver medal for the inaugural Women Poetry Prize by the prestigious journal Women: A Cultural Review.

 

Dr Huen's essay "Transculturalism, Transformation and the Visual Arts in Contemporary British Women’s Poetry" is made of detailed analyses of mainly the works of two British poets, namely, Grace Nichols and Pascale Petit, who were born in Guyana and France respectively. The two case studies have demonstrated how women poets of non-white and mixed-race ancestries return to engaging with art from a diasporic perspective or art from a foreign culture and to exploring the potential and limits of art as a life-, self- and trauma-transmuting agent.

 

The judges praised Dr Huen's essay for its unique and refreshing analysis of the poets' works that focuses on ekphrasis and compares the two in terms of practice and ethics. The essay was also considered to be written in a clear style and contain many insightful readings and engagements with secondary material.

 

Dr Huen's research and teaching interests include Hong Kong literature in English, contemporary British poetry, poetry and the visual arts, creative writing teaching and practice, and poets in the digital age. His works have been published in leading poetry magazines, academic journals and edited books. 

 

In 2022, he was awarded the inaugural Wasafiri Essay Prize by the British literary quarterly Wasafiri for an essay that has defined the concepts of Hong Kong and Chinese ekphrasis and analysed the works of a group of British-Chinese poets. The essay illuminates the close connections between contemporary British poetry, cultural memory, and diaspora, as well as the complex geopolitical relations between Hong Kong, mainland China, and the United Kingdom.