The Shanghai International Literary Festival is an annual event held each March in China's largest city, Shanghai.
The Shanghai International Literary Festival, started in 2003, began as a sister festival to the Hong Kong International Literary Festival. Hosted at M on the Bund and the Glamour Bar, the Festival grew from small beginnings to China’s leading, and largest, English-language literary event. At its peak (2006-2013), the Festival extended over three weekends with a roster of over 50 international and local authors and an audience of more than 4,000. With the closing of the Glamour Bar in 2014, the Festival has been reduced in size and duration, running for 10 days and featuring 25 authors. Its programs include winners of the world's leading literary prizes, including the Man Booker, National Book Award for Fiction, the Miles Franklin award and others.
The Festival was started by Michelle Garnaut, Jenny Laing Peach and Tina Kanagaratnam in 2003 [1] and attracts authors from around the world and at home in China, for a celebration of the best in fiction, literary non-fiction, journalism, poetry and children’s writing. Activities include interactive forums, sessions in other languages such as Mandarin, Italian and French, as well as popular sessions with well-known writers including Man Booker Prize winners John Banville, Allan Hollinghurst, Thomas Keneally, Kiran Desai and Anne Enright. The Festival has hosted such celebrities as The Simpsons creator Matt Groening, Amy Tan, Jan Morris, Shirley Hazzard and the legendary Gore Vidal, as well as sessions with well respected and established writers such as Ma Jian, Christopher Kremmer, John Man, Anna Funder, Simon Winchester and Hari Kunzru as well as participation from emerging authors such as Guo Xiaolu, Wang Xiaoli, Priya Basil, James Bradley, Kunal Basu and Mishi Saran.
Eileen Chang (traditional Chinese: 張愛玲; simplified Chinese: 张爱玲; pinyin: Zhāng Àilíng; Wade–Giles: Chang1 Ai4-ling2;September 30, 1920 – September 8, 1995), also known as Chang Ai-ling or Zhang Ailing, or by her pen name Liang Jing (梁京), was a Chinese-born American essayist, novelist, and screenwriter. She was a well-known feminist woman writer of Chinese literature, known for portraying life in the 1940s Shanghai and Hong Kong.
Nury Vittachi is a journalist and author based in Hong Kong. He has written the novel series The Feng Shui Detective, as well as non-fiction works and novels for children.
Brian Albert Castro is an Australian novelist and essayist.
Wang Anyi is a Chinese writer, vice-chair of the China Writers Association since 2006, and professor in Chinese Literature at Fudan University since 2004.
Charles William Foran is a Canadian writer in Toronto, Ontario.
Alison Pick is a Canadian writer. She is most noted for her Booker Prize-nominated novel Far to Go, and was a winner of the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award for most promising writer in Canada under 35.
Xu Xi, is an English language novelist from Hong Kong.
Alfred A. Yuson, also known as Krip Yuson, is a Filipino author of novels, poetry and short stories.
Madeleine Thien is a Canadian short story writer and novelist. The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature has considered her work as reflecting the increasingly trans-cultural nature of Canadian literature, exploring art, expression and politics inside Cambodia and China, as well as within diasporic East Asian communities. Thien's critically acclaimed novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, won the 2016 Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards for Fiction. It was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and the 2017 Rathbones Folio Prize. Her books have been translated into more than 25 languages.
Yan Lianke is a Chinese writer of novels and short stories based in Beijing. His work is highly satirical, which has resulted in some of his most renowned works being banned in China. He has admitted to self-censorship while writing his stories in order to avoid censorship.
Justin Hill is an English novelist.
Tan Twan Eng is a Malaysian novelist who writes in English. He is best known for his 2012 book The Garden of Evening Mists which won the Man Asian Literary Prize and Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, making Tan the first Malaysian to be recognised by all three awards.
Wena Poon is a lawyer and novelist based in the United States. She writes English-language fiction. Her work has been seen by academics in the UK, US and Singapore as representative of the transnationalism of her generation.
Michelle Anne Garnaut, is an Australian restaurateur and cook best known for her series of restaurants in China including M on the Bund, Glam, Capital M, the Glamour Bar and M at the Fringe. Garnaut is also a founder of the Shanghai International Literary Festival, the M Literary Residency, the Village People Project and has spearheaded Mentor Walks in both Beijing and Shanghai. In 2018, Garnaut was awarded an Order of Australia (AO) for her work.
Damian Leighton Barr is a Scottish writer and broadcaster. He is the creator and host of the Literary Salon, which started at Shoreditch House in 2008, and he hosts live literary events worldwide. In 2014 and 2015, he presented several editions of the BBC Radio 4 cultural programme Front Row. He has hosted several television series including Shelf Isolation and most recently The Big Scottish Book Club for BBC Scotland. He is the author of the 2013 memoir Maggie & Me, about his 1980s childhood in the west of Scotland, and the 2019 novel You Will Be Safe Here, set in South Africa in 1901 and now. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA).
The Bookworm is a China-based literary organization with three bookstores by the same name in Beijing, Chengdu and Suzhou. As of November 2019 all locations have closed. In addition to selling books, The Bookworm is a restaurant, cafe, event space and library with more than 50,000 English and Chinese titles. Lonely Planet called it one of the “world’s greatest bookshops.”
Shanghai Dancing is a 2003 novel by Australian novelist Brian Castro.
The George Town Literary Festival (GTLF) is an annual literary festival which takes place in the city of George Town, Penang, Malaysia. It is currently the largest world literature festival organised in Malaysia and the first literary event in Southeast Asia to receive the Literary Festival Award at the London Book Fair International Excellence Awards.
The Vancouver Writers Fest is a non-profit organization that produces a variety of literary events in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Its main event is the Vancouver Writers Fest, which is an annual week-long literary festival held on Granville Island, Vancouver in late October. Writers from Canada and abroad attend the festival to perform readings, interviews and panel discussions. The organization also runs the Incite reading series in the spring and the Spreading the Word schools program year-round.
Douglas Kerr is a British writer and academic who is best known for his work on Arthur Conan Doyle and George Orwell.