Quarantine rules, workplace relationships and mental health among subjects of discussion at the 2021 Hong Kong International Literary Festival

At the 2021 Hong Kong International Literary Festival, psychologists will discuss the impact on mental health of the world’s longest hotel quarantine

Other discussions will cover the role that family plays in mental health, as well as how we re-enact our early childhood experiences in the workplace

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Discussions at the 2021 Hong Kong International Literary Festival will cover subjects such as the city’s three-week quarantine and its impacts. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 5:45pm, 3 Nov 2021Updated: 10:06pm, 4 Nov 2021

Recovery, resilience and mental health are the key themes of this year’s Hong Kong International Literary Festival. Festival director Catherine Platt, a veteran of the city’s gruelling three-week hotel quarantine, says the “Rebound Edition” will tap into the therapeutic power of storytelling.

“We wanted to reflect on the shared challenges of the pandemic, as well as the ways people survive and thrive in difficult times. And books are therapy – a comfort, resource and means of escape – so mental health is the perfect theme for a literary festival,” says Platt, who has done coronavirus quarantine three times in Hong Kong.

If there is a silver lining to the pandemic, it is that there is much greater awareness and discussion of mental health, and putting it front and centre of the festival is recognition of this. It threads through the line-up, from the fiction and non-fiction events to the panel discussions.

Bestselling novelist and memoirist Alice Pung will join fellow Australian author Emily Maguire to examine the crucial role that family plays in happiness and mental health. Pung’s new book, One Hundred Days, is about Karuna, a pregnant 16-year-old growing up in economically depressed Melbourne in the late 1980s.

Alice Pung is a bestselling novelist and memoirist.

Her mother locks her up in the third trimester of her pregnancy in their housing-commission flat for 100 days, to protect her from the outside world – and make sure she can’t get into any more trouble. The teenager becomes very bored and depressed.