The Global Times reports:Ever since the Bookworm Beijing bookstore postponed and later canceled its annual Bookworm International Literary Festival (BLF) fans have been waiting and wondering whether the 10-year-old event would return.
Well, the wait is over as according to Peter Goff, the general manager of the Bookworm, the BLF will be back in full swing from March 8 to 24 in 2018 in Beijing, Chengdu and Suzhou.
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Ouyang Jianghe 欧阳江河 has been named a writer-in-residence at Beijing Normal University. China Daily reports:In a symposium at BNU on March 16, Yu Hua 余华 called Ouyang a “broad and complex” poet for relating history to modern times. Mo Yan 莫言, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012, said Ouyang’s poems always touch on the essence of life and the poet has the ability to make his culturally profound and philosophical poems understandable to the general public.
While compliments were paid to Ouyang’s literary achievement at the symposium, the poet said he wants to hear more criticism. He said that since many new things have occurred so rapidly in modern poetry over the past three decades, it’s harder for classics and milestone pieces to emerge.
“Our poems are still just the questions, not the answers,” he said.
Ouyang also said during the symposium that one of his biggest childhood dreams was to become a college professor. However, he never had the chance to even attend college as he was already 35 when he retired from his service in the army.
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China will be guest of honor at the International Istanbul Book Fair (Nov 2-10), with the theme being the Journey of Chinese literature from traditional to contemporary as illustrated by the “New Silk Road.”
Festivities are scheduled to include Xi Chuan 西川 and sixteen other Chinese authors, such as Ge Fei 葛菲, Jiang Nan 江南, Lao Ma 马俊杰, Li Jingze 李敬泽, Liu Zhenyun 刘震云, Su tong 苏童, Wang Gang 王刚, Yang Hongying 杨红樱, Yu Hua 余华, Zhang Wei 张炜, Zhang Yueran 张悦然, and China Writers Association president, Tie Ning 铁凝.
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In yesterday’s post on the review of Bei Dao’s The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems (New Directions, edited by Eliot Weinberger), I also mentioned the short collection of Bei Dao’s poetry Endure (Black Widow Press), which I translated with Clayton Eshleman. That collection earned a gracious mention–along with books by Yan Lianke 阎连科, Han Shaogong 韩少功, Yu Hua 余华, and Nobel Prize-winner Mo Yan 莫言–from the editors of Path Light on their Wall St. Journal blog post, “Found in Translation: Five Chinese Books You Should Read.”
Take a look at the full listing!
The Asia Society has announced the finalists for its Bernard Schwartz Book Award. The only literary author shortlisted is Yu Hua 余华:
- Cambodia’s Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land by Joel Brinkley (PublicAffairs)
- China in Ten Words by Yu Hua (Pantheon Books)
- Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China by Ezra Vogel (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press)
- Water: Asia’s New Battleground by Brahma Chellaney (Georgetown University Press)
- Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia by Thant Myint-U (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
For more information, including the list of judges, click here.