feature:
The Best of the Lit Fest

Jamie.Barys, 2011-03

This year’s ninth annual Shanghai International Literary Festival is the biggest yet with over 80 authors from 17 countries. At TALK we’ve scoured the program to reveal the best and brightest in this year’s class of participants.For a full schedule, please see: www.m-restaurantgroup.com/mbund/literary-festival.html

Most Likely To Appear On Hu Jintao’s Kindle: Pallavi Aiyar

It seems like every single newspaper in the world can’t stop talking about the simultaneous rise of India and China, but the constant media onslaught is more often than not uneducated, insulting and based on stereotypes. Cue Pallavi Aiyar to the rescue. The award-winning journalist and author is a native of India who lived down a hutong in Beijing for six years while working as the bureau chief for The Hindu, and she lived to tell the tale. Or rather to publish it. Her 2008 book Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China deftly manages to serve as memoir and socio-political analysis of the two fastest-growing economies. The foreign policy wonks go wild!

Now living in Brussels, Aiyar has made a literary return to the Middle Kingdom, this time in the form of fiction. She recently published Chinese Whiskers, a modern fable set in contemporary Beijing. The story is narrated by a pair of cats adopted by a family of laowai and makes references to events that dominated the China headlines for the past decade: the Olympics, SARS and food safety scandals.

6 March. 1pm. Pallavi Aiyar, winner of the China-India Friendship Award, reflects on “Chindia” with moderator Greg Wasserstrom at Glamour Bar.

Most Likely To Excite Philatelists: Thomas Keneally

You know you’ve made it when they put your face on a stamp. One of the most famous authors to grace the stage at this year’s Lit Fest, Thomas Keneally is a born writer. In 1964 he published his first novel at just 29 years old, and he’s produced a total of 31 novels, 16 non-fiction books and four plays during the course of his career. The most famous of his novels, Schindler’s Ark (later republished as Schindler’s List), received the Booker Prize in 1982 and was made into a feature film directed by Steven Spielberg. The movie went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.

In addition, three more of Keneally’s books have been nominated for the Booker. He’s won the Miles Franklin Award twice, the Los Angeles Times Prize, the Mondello International Prize and the University of California gold medal. Keneally was named a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library, a Fellow of the American Academy, an Officer of the Order of Australia and an Australian Living Treasure. If that’s not enough, he is now on the 55 cent Australian stamp. Congrats!