*The price of the ticket is redeemable off the price of a copy of Freely Frayed on the night

Join us for an evening with poetry legend Don Mee Choi. She will be in conversation with critically acclaimed writer SJ Kim

Freely Frayed gathers early poems, recent essays and translation notes by National Book Award-winning poet Don Mee Choi. Featuring Choi’s radical modes of writing back to empire, the collection offers both the underpinnings of her acclaimed KOR-US Trilogy (Hardly War, DMZ Colony, and Mirror Nation) and the intersecting points of personal experience and memory that have evolved during the time of writing the books. Freely Frayed grapples with the politics of distance and language in exploration of anti-colonial logic and identity, illustrating memory’s enactment of translation and a notion of salvage that creates a dialogue between forms. Simultaneously restless and playful, these poems and essays move us to inspect our own sense of place and language, and in turn to ask what history is built from this record.

Don Mee Choi is a highly innovative poet and a translator. Her work slips between forms, mixing poetry, lyric essay, memoir, and visual image. Incorporating archives, photographs and fragments of memory, Choi’s poetry explores historical events and the human impact of war. She was born in Seoul, South Korea, into a family forced to leave Korea in 1972 when she was a child, during the Park Chung Hee dictatorship. Her books include the highly acclaimed KOR-US trilogy (Hardly War DMZ Colony and Mirror Nation, the three titles originally published in the USA by Wave Books between 2016 and 2024). DMZ Colony won the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. Her translations of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry won the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.

SJ Kim was born in Korea and raised in the American South. She is the author of This Part Is Silent, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Her writing on racial, gendered, institutional and political violence has appeared in Wasafiri, Oxford American, and The Hanok Review, among other publications. She resides in the UK and teaches creative writing at the University of Warwick.

Date: 9th November 2026

Time: Doors @6:30pm & 7pm to start

Location: Round Table Books 10-11 Granville Arcade Coldharbour Lane London SW9 8PR