Diversity, enthusiasm … dentistry: Hong Kong literary festival lauded as one of the world’s best by authors

For Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz it was the diversity of the audience, for Louis de Bernières meeting a very tall Japanese woman and a dentist’s chair

The festival’s 20th edition next month will make new memories – if for no other reason than that Covid-19 has forced the virtual staging of a lot of its events

Reading Time:5 minutes

Author Jeong Yu-jeong of South Korean at a book signing at last year’s Hong Kong International Literary Festival. Photo: Isaac Lawrence

Published: 12:15pm, 28 Oct 2020Updated: 1:24pm, 2 Nov 2020

Nothing, it seemed, could stop the literary-festival snowball: a permanently rolling, swelling agglomeration of 400 members and counting, now with its own global association.

This year, however, festivals great and small have found that they can be stopped by an invisible adversary – or obliged to adapt to Covid-19 to ensure the show goes on.

Approaching its 20th incarnation, the Hong Kong International Literary Festival (HKILF) long ago established itself among the worldwide elite. Originally known as the Standard Chartered International Literary Festival, it sought to foster a multifarious literary culture by bringing to Hong Kong authors, Asian and otherwise, who write in (or are translated into) English but who eschew familiar Western perspectives. Those founding principles will be upheld in the 2020 edition of the festival, which begins next month in a revised format.

In April, Catherine Platt, former head of the literary festival in the Chinese city of Chengdu, joined the Hong Kong event’s organisers as director. While she has embraced the difficulties involved in presenting a radically different event to that envisaged early in the year, Platt recognises the festival’s history and resonance.

Catherine Platt, director of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival. Photo: courtesy Catherine Platt

“I’ve followed the HKILF from a distance, but this is the first I’ve attended. I admired the way previous directors brought in major international names while also programming interesting events with local talent,” she says.

Despite a dearth of advertising, the festival’s first whiff of success came with its inaugural, 2001 edition, which ran for three days. Local headliners included Louise Ho, Michael Vatikiotis and Dino Mahoney. From overseas came Kirpal Singh, Teo Hsu-ming and Romesh Gunesekera (who returns this year. Timothy Mo was top of the bill – and earned lasting notoriety for his scurrilous comments about Western women.