Simon Elegant: City on Fire — A Novel of Hong Kong
Simon Elegant discusses his detective novel set in protest-torn Hong Kong with former Deputy National Security Advisor Kurt Campbell at Politics and Prose.
Why we picked this
A novelist who reported from Hong Kong for years in conversation with the U.S. official who shaped China policy — the genre is detective fiction, but the stakes on stage are geopolitical.
Simon Elegant spent years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, and his novel “City on Fire” draws on that immersion — a detective story set against the backdrop of Hong Kong’s 2019 protests, when the city’s political identity was being contested in the streets. The choice of genre is deliberate: crime fiction can carry political weight that straight reportage sometimes cannot, following an individual character through collective upheaval.
What makes this particular event unusually textured is the choice of conversation partner. Kurt Campbell, former Deputy National Security Advisor and one of the architects of recent U.S. China policy, brings an analytical and governmental perspective to a work of literary fiction. The conversation is likely to move between the novel’s internal world and the geopolitical forces that shaped it — a pairing that Politics and Prose, conveniently located in a city full of people who think about both, is well positioned to host.
The event is free and open to the public at Politics and Prose’s Connecticut Avenue location.