Author Talk: Simon Elegant — City on Fire: A Novel of Hong Kong - with Kurt Campbell
May 16, 2026
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46:00Now PlayingAuthor Talk: Simon Elegant — City on Fire: A Novel of Hong Kong - with Kurt Campbell
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as posted by the channelWatch author Simon Elegant discuss " City on Fire" at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.
A police detective in Hong Kong races to solve a vicious murder, while the city around him teeters on the brink of destruction.
Hong Kong is a city ablaze—its streets filled with protesters, its government in crisis, its people torn between rage and fear of what defiance might cost. At the center stands Superintendent Killian Tong, once a rising star in the police, now disgraced and haunted by a tragic accident at a protest. Exiled to a remote post, Killian is called back when a dismembered body is uncovered in a landfill. The gruesome murder could be his path to redemption—if he can withstand mounting pressure from superiors desperate to bury the truth, and the even more dangerous fractures within his own family.
City on Fire is both a taut thriller and a deeply human story of loyalty, betrayal, and the search for redemption in a city under siege.
Simon Elegant is China bureau chief for The Washington Post, based in Taiwan. Previously, he held a variety of reporting and editing jobs in Asia including Beijing bureau chief and Southeast Asia correspondent for Time magazine. Elegant was the founding partner and investor in Temple Restaurant Beijing, which won the 2019 readers’ choice award from TripAdvisor as the world’s best restaurant. He is the author of two previous novels, A Chinese Wedding (Piatkus), and A Floating Life (Ecco/Harper), about China’s greatest poet, Li Bai, a novel that succeeded “in summoning up the man and his age in ways that are both deliciously foreign and all too familiar,” according to the New York Times.
Elegant is in conversation with Kurt Campbell, a veteran U.S. diplomat and strategic strategist widely regarded as a chief architect of Washington’s “pivot to Asia.” He served as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs under Barack Obama and later as the White House Indo-Pacific coordinator—often described as the administration’s “Asia czar”—under Joe Biden. Across these roles, he has been central to shaping U.S. policy toward China, blending engagement with strategic competition.
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