Karina La'O

Karina is a Philippine diasporic writer, having grown up in Hong Kong with Philippine heritage. Her writing often revolves around the desire for belonging, national and personal identity, mental health, and 'coming-of-age'.

Karina had received an MA with Merit in Creative Writing – Prose Fiction at UEA in 2024 and a BA(Hons) in Visual Studies from Lingnan University, Hong Kong in 2022.

She is currently pursing her PhD at UEA with her Creative/Critical Writing Project, Reimagining the Witch: The Babaylan in Filipino Culture and Identity & The Labyrinth, a novel. The project revolves around the witch figure in contemporary Philippine society and its relation to discourse on the Philippine national identity and consciousness. She is critically supervised by Karen Schaller and creatively supervised by Naomi Wood.

Outside academia, Karina had pursued writing through a mentorship with OWN Academy and Soho House Hong Kong, where she had been mentored by Gary Liu, former CEO of the South China Morning Post, in writing the beginning of her wip novel Mila & Eden. She had also been a featured short story writer for Zolima CityMag's After_ exhibition and won first place in Hong Kong's Top Story Competition (Junior Division) in 2016. Her poetry collection, A Body of Words, was self-published in 2023 in partnership with illustrator Michaela Ruth Gallardo.

Additionally, she had been a freelance editor for Mark de Rond, Professor of Organizational Ethnography at Cambridge University, and will be credited in his upcoming publication Dark Justice: Inside the World of Pedophile Hunters.