Memoirist Katie Goh and novelist Emma Nanami Strenner talk to journalist Suyin Haynes about evolving new ways to celebrate ESEA heritage as diasporans, and the way roots, migration and mixed race identity inform their work.
Katie Goh is a writer and editor and the author of Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange, published by Canongate in May 2025. Her award-nominated essays, journalism and criticism have appeared in publications including Port, the Guardian, Gutter, Wasafiri, i-D, Dazed and gal-dem, and she is an editor for Extra Teeth literary magazine. Her book of essays The End: Surviving the World Through Imagined Disasters was a Reviewer’s Choice for The Big Issue’s Independent Books of 2021 and shortlisted for the inaugural Kavya Prize in 2022. She grew up in the north of Ireland and lives in Edinburgh.
Emma Nanami Strenner’s My Other Heart was published by Hutchinson Heinemann in July 2025 and chosen as Stylist’s Book of the Month. She has been a journalist for over twenty years, writing for VOGUE International, ELLE, Stylist Magazine, Condé Nast Traveller and The Times. Emma is British Japanese and studied at the University of Leeds. She completed the Curtis Brown Creative Six-Month Novel Writing Course and is also a Faber Academy Alumni. She has spent much of her life living abroad in Japan, Vietnam, Australia, China, Singapore and the US. She currently lives in London.
Suyin Haynes is a Malaysian British freelance journalist interested in storytelling at the intersections of identity, culture and underrepresented communities. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, CNN, Jacobin and more. She is a lecturer in journalism at City St George's, University of London, and she is currently working towards an MA in South East Asian Studies at SOAS.
