Hong Kong steps onto the international literary stage
By Joyce Hor-Chung Lau International Herald Tribune
FRIDAY, MARCH 24, 2006
HONG KONG Nury Vittachi, a journalist and novelist, recalls the dire state of Hong Kong's English-language literary scene a decade ago, when even major international authors could not draw an audience.
"Doris Lessing was here and was supposed to be doing a signing for two hours," he said, recalling an event that took place in the 1990s. "I had planned to go towards the end, when the crowds had cleared. But when I went, there was no crowd. I found her sitting quietly by herself, reading one of my books. It was such a shame. So she signed my book and I signed hers." There has been a sea-change in Hong Kong, where foreign authors now attract crowds of fans, and where literary events sell out weeks in advance, as was the case with talks this month by Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Prize-winning poet, and John Banville, the most recent winner of the Man Booker Prize. One would hardly expect Irish authors to be big crowd-pleasers in a Cantonese-speaking city all but obsessed with Asian pop stars; but they were top-billed attractions at the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival, which played host to about 50 authors this month.
Also this month, Hong Kong becomes home to a new international literary prize and to the relaunched Asia Literary Review. Major overseas publishers and agents, meanwhile, have been making regular visits or setting up operations in this area.
The fear that Hong Kong would lose its English-language heritage after the 1997 handover from British to Chinese rule now seems misplaced.
At the same time, greater China is playing an increasingly important role on the international literary scene. More Asians are learning English and buying more foreign books. Meanwhile, American and British publishers are becoming more interested in Asian writers, particularly young Chinese ones, whose works have the potential to sell well in the West.
Hong Kong is working hard to position itself in the middle of this potentially booming book trade. Last week Man Investments announced it would sponsor a new Hong Kong-based literary prize starting in the autumn of 2007 - its only literary prize aside from the two prestigious Booker awards. According to a news release, judges will read unpublished English-language works looking for "new Asian literature to be brought to the attention of English-reading audiences around the world."
"The nice thing about this prize is that it will concentrate on unpublished works," Vittachi said. "There has never before been such a channel to introduce Asian writers onto the world literary stage like this."
The Man Hong Kong Literary Festival, which Vittachi co-founded, has grown in six years from being a small local event to one attracting worldwide attention.
"I'm not surprised at all that this festival has grown. I'm just surprised nobody else did it earlier," said Peter Gordon, director of the festival. "There is nowhere else in the rest of Asia with a market for literature like this.
"English is the lingua franca of Asia," he added. "And Hong Kong is Asia's English-language hub."
Gordon is also the founder of an online bookseller called Paddyfield.com, a founder of the Asian Review of Books and the publisher of Chameleon Press - all based in Hong Kong. He is making sure his festival is getting a foothold into mainland China by opening a small office in Shanghai and holding literary events there.
As a rule the offices of publishers and agents in the region tend to be very new and very small.
Jo Lusby, the general manager (China) for the Penguin Group, registered the company's Beijing office less than a year ago with the modest goal of buying the international rights to four to six books a year. The first book acquired by this new office is "Wolf Totem," originally written in Chinese. Translations into nine other languages are in the works, Lusby says. The novel, about a disappearing way of life in Inner Mongolia, has political overtones and was written under the nom de plume of Jiang Rong.
"I'd love to say I went from house to house in China looking for banned books," Lusby said. "But I actually went to the Xinhua bookstore in Beijing, got the current best seller, read it and said 'This is a great book."'
She added: "The quality of the writing coming out of China is much higher than we had thought it would be."
The rising interest in East Asian literature comes a few decades after major South Asian-born writers, like Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, made it big with English-language works.
Meanwhile, Pan McMillan, which has had a Hong Kong office for four years, recently announced that it would launch Picador Asia, a Hong Kong-based literary imprint that is expected to release its first book in August.
Daniel Watts, the Hong Kong-based managing director of Pan McMillan Asia, cited Picador India, which is considered well-established and successful in Asia, as "a mirror image of what we are trying to do here." (Picador is a subsidiary of Pan McMillan.)
"This is about building a local identity for us in Asia, and to create a source of quality writing," he said. "We do it in good faith."
This new branch has not yet published any books, and has signed only three books so far. Watts also says sales numbers do not yet justify what Pan McMillan has spent in seeking out new Chinese literary fiction. His goal is to work for the long term, he says.
As in most industries, all eyes are on mainland China's population of 1.3 billion, and the potentially enormous market that could yield. Yet Hong Kong, with its relatively small population of seven million, is playing a key role because of its free business environment, its highly literate English-speaking population and, perhaps most important, the fact that it is outside the control of mainland Chinese censors.
"I come to Hong Kong and see a free literary environment," said Lusby of Penguin, who flew from Beijing to Hong Kong to attend the literary festival. "I can tell my authors in Beijing that they have a platform here, and a responsive readership. They are not used to giving talks. They are used to sitting garrets and scribbling."
The emphasis in Hong Kong is on building the kind of infrastructure and public participation that is part of the literary scenes in cities like London or New York.
"Before, the whole food chain was missing. We didn't have literary agents, a literary magazine, literary editors or a literary festival," Vittachi said of Hong Kong. "Now the pieces of the chain are coming together. The Man literary prize was the last piece of the puzzle."
Gordon added: "We are now part of the world publishing infrastructure. Ask a publisher in London about the Hong Kong literary festival, and they will know about it."
"Doris Lessing was here and was supposed to be doing a signing for two hours," he said, recalling an event that took place in the 1990s. "I had planned to go towards the end, when the crowds had cleared. But when I went, there was no crowd. I found her sitting quietly by herself, reading one of my books. It was such a shame. So she signed my book and I signed hers." There has been a sea-change in Hong Kong, where foreign authors now attract crowds of fans, and where literary events sell out weeks in advance, as was the case with talks this month by Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Prize-winning poet, and John Banville, the most recent winner of the Man Booker Prize. One would hardly expect Irish authors to be big crowd-pleasers in a Cantonese-speaking city all but obsessed with Asian pop stars; but they were top-billed attractions at the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival, which played host to about 50 authors this month.
Also this month, Hong Kong becomes home to a new international literary prize and to the relaunched Asia Literary Review. Major overseas publishers and agents, meanwhile, have been making regular visits or setting up operations in this area.
The fear that Hong Kong would lose its English-language heritage after the 1997 handover from British to Chinese rule now seems misplaced.
At the same time, greater China is playing an increasingly important role on the international literary scene. More Asians are learning English and buying more foreign books. Meanwhile, American and British publishers are becoming more interested in Asian writers, particularly young Chinese ones, whose works have the potential to sell well in the West.
Hong Kong is working hard to position itself in the middle of this potentially booming book trade. Last week Man Investments announced it would sponsor a new Hong Kong-based literary prize starting in the autumn of 2007 - its only literary prize aside from the two prestigious Booker awards. According to a news release, judges will read unpublished English-language works looking for "new Asian literature to be brought to the attention of English-reading audiences around the world."
"The nice thing about this prize is that it will concentrate on unpublished works," Vittachi said. "There has never before been such a channel to introduce Asian writers onto the world literary stage like this."
The Man Hong Kong Literary Festival, which Vittachi co-founded, has grown in six years from being a small local event to one attracting worldwide attention.
"I'm not surprised at all that this festival has grown. I'm just surprised nobody else did it earlier," said Peter Gordon, director of the festival. "There is nowhere else in the rest of Asia with a market for literature like this.
"English is the lingua franca of Asia," he added. "And Hong Kong is Asia's English-language hub."
Gordon is also the founder of an online bookseller called Paddyfield.com, a founder of the Asian Review of Books and the publisher of Chameleon Press - all based in Hong Kong. He is making sure his festival is getting a foothold into mainland China by opening a small office in Shanghai and holding literary events there.
As a rule the offices of publishers and agents in the region tend to be very new and very small.
Jo Lusby, the general manager (China) for the Penguin Group, registered the company's Beijing office less than a year ago with the modest goal of buying the international rights to four to six books a year. The first book acquired by this new office is "Wolf Totem," originally written in Chinese. Translations into nine other languages are in the works, Lusby says. The novel, about a disappearing way of life in Inner Mongolia, has political overtones and was written under the nom de plume of Jiang Rong.
"I'd love to say I went from house to house in China looking for banned books," Lusby said. "But I actually went to the Xinhua bookstore in Beijing, got the current best seller, read it and said 'This is a great book."'
She added: "The quality of the writing coming out of China is much higher than we had thought it would be."
The rising interest in East Asian literature comes a few decades after major South Asian-born writers, like Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, made it big with English-language works.
Meanwhile, Pan McMillan, which has had a Hong Kong office for four years, recently announced that it would launch Picador Asia, a Hong Kong-based literary imprint that is expected to release its first book in August.
Daniel Watts, the Hong Kong-based managing director of Pan McMillan Asia, cited Picador India, which is considered well-established and successful in Asia, as "a mirror image of what we are trying to do here." (Picador is a subsidiary of Pan McMillan.)
"This is about building a local identity for us in Asia, and to create a source of quality writing," he said. "We do it in good faith."
This new branch has not yet published any books, and has signed only three books so far. Watts also says sales numbers do not yet justify what Pan McMillan has spent in seeking out new Chinese literary fiction. His goal is to work for the long term, he says.
As in most industries, all eyes are on mainland China's population of 1.3 billion, and the potentially enormous market that could yield. Yet Hong Kong, with its relatively small population of seven million, is playing a key role because of its free business environment, its highly literate English-speaking population and, perhaps most important, the fact that it is outside the control of mainland Chinese censors.
"I come to Hong Kong and see a free literary environment," said Lusby of Penguin, who flew from Beijing to Hong Kong to attend the literary festival. "I can tell my authors in Beijing that they have a platform here, and a responsive readership. They are not used to giving talks. They are used to sitting garrets and scribbling."
The emphasis in Hong Kong is on building the kind of infrastructure and public participation that is part of the literary scenes in cities like London or New York.
"Before, the whole food chain was missing. We didn't have literary agents, a literary magazine, literary editors or a literary festival," Vittachi said of Hong Kong. "Now the pieces of the chain are coming together. The Man literary prize was the last piece of the puzzle."
Gordon added: "We are now part of the world publishing infrastructure. Ask a publisher in London about the Hong Kong literary festival, and they will know about it."
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