On 2 October, Dr Steve Haonan Ma of the HDT team took part in “GBA Podcast Lab: Six Cities, One Mic”, a series that looks at urban literature and culture across the Greater Bay Area.

In the episode, Dr Ma discusses the relationship between literature written in Hong Kong and the culture around it, and how the city’s particular position has shaped what its writers notice and how they write. The conversation then widens to the region, comparing the cultural character of the different Bay Area cities and what each brings to a shared literary landscape.

The series is funded by the CTL Spark Fund at Beijing Normal-Hong Kong Baptist University. It is intended to support teaching reform, build a community of learners, and develop students who can work across disciplines. For the platform, taking part is a way of putting Hong Kong’s literary culture into a regional conversation, and of showing how humanities research can be carried to a public audience through a medium people already listen to.