Starting a new chapter

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Published: 12:00am, 5 May 2001Updated: 10:24pm, 27 Oct 2020

'BUILD IT AND they will come' was the motto that drove Jane Camens to organise Hong Kong's first international literary festival. With one week before the start of the little-promoted event, however, and many lackadaisical book-browsers still fingering the pages of last year's blockbusters, a more appropriate slogan might be 'Build it . . . but will they come?'

While posters and leaflets for the May 11-13 festival have begun appearing in bookshops and on university campuses in the past week, Camens acknowledges it will be a challenge to not only inform the public of the event, but also entice Hong Kong's reluctant readers to take part.

'Of course we're worried; and there's been no advertising,' she says, adding that 'knowing the nature of Hong Kong', the $80-$180 tickets to many of the discussions and talks will only start to move in the last few days.

But Australian-born Camens, who dreamed up the festival nine months ago while contemplating a master's thesis on fiction in Asia, is characteristically cheerful about the event's prospects and excited that Hong Kong will soon be host to an inspiring group of authors from the region as well as such internationally acclaimed writers as Booker Prize nominees Timothy Mo and Romesh Gunesekera, and San Francisco-based Gail Tsukiyama.

That Tsukiyama was invited just over a week ago, however, is telling of the somewhat haphazard organisation of this inaugural event, officially called the Standard Chartered International Literary Festival. Hearing from Vivienne Wong, managing director of book distribution company Publishers Associates, that the author of The Language Of Threads and Women Of The Silk would be visiting Hong Kong this month, Camens seized the opportunity to add another badly needed star to the billing. Within a day Tsukiyama was on the festival web site (www.paddyfield.com.hk), though identified incorrectly as a writer from Japan.

Camens guffaws at the blunder, confessing 'she was a new name for me' and saying the mistake was quickly fixed. In the same disarming way she admits that while au fait with local writers taking part, including Agnes Lam, P.K. Leung and Michael Vatikiotis, she was unfamiliar with most of the foreign authors invited, among them Lau Siew Mei from Australia, Atima Srivastava from Britain, Goh Poh Seng from Canada, Kee Thuan Chye from Malaysia, Krip Yuson from the Philippines, Leong Liew Geok from Singapore and Shawn Wong from the United States (see opposite page).