In July, we opened a one-week special window (4–10 July 2026), calling for unpublished fiction writers to submit short stories that are set in Asia or explore Asian themes. We have now completed the selection, and the chosen stories will be appearing in the journal over the next two weeks.

While we continue to welcome general submissions that fall within the remit and ethos of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, over the coming months we are especially keen to receive work related to Hong Kong. We would like to devote sustained attention to Hong Kong literature and culture, past and present, and to creative and critical work that engages with, revisits, remembers, questions, documents, or reimagines the city and its cultural life, old and new.

We welcome, among other possibilities:

• Reviews and criticism on Hong Kong books and writers, films, television, theatre, visual art, photography, music, exhibitions, performance, architecture, design, comics, graphic narratives, and other forms of cultural production.
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• Essays and features on Hong Kong literature and culture, including individual writers and artists, literary and cultural movements, archives, independent publishing, bookshops, magazines, festivals, and cultural institutions.
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• Interviews and conversations with writers, artists, translators, editors, publishers, filmmakers, academics, and other cultural practitioners.
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• Creative work, including fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction, that is set in Hong Kong or engages with the city in some way.
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• Translations into English of Hong Kong writing from Chinese and other languages, as well as work on translation, multilingualism, Cantonese, and literary language.
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• Writing on Hong Kong and its people, including work concerned with family histories, migration, diaspora, displacement, belonging, class, labour, gender, sexuality, ecology, urban change, memory, identity, popular culture, food, education, childhood, ageing, and Hong Kong’s relationship with other places.
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• Writing from and about the Hong Kong diaspora, including work that asks what Hong Kong literature might mean beyond geographical and linguistic boundaries.

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The connection to Hong Kong need not be celebratory, straightforward, or nostalgic. Hong Kong might be the principal subject, the setting, a point of departure, a memory, a recurring presence, or the lens through which something larger is considered. We are interested in complexity, contradiction, intimacy, distance, affection, criticism, and estrangement.

This is not a special issue or a limited submission window. Rather, over the coming months and beyond, we hope to foreground Hong Kong in Cha while continuing to publish and welcome submissions relating to Asia more broadly.

We look forward to reading your work. Please surprise us.