Off the Shelf

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The Hong Kong International Literary Festival—that sure sounds like an oxymoron. Isn't Hong Kong the place where residents are interested exclusively in the Hang Seng Index, Rolex watches and, um, Rolex watches? Where the closest thing to a hot comic novel is Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa's latest plan to stabilize the real estate market?

Apparently not. This week, the third annual Hong Kong International Literary Festival will bring together international and Asian writers for eight days of discussions and seminars, most of which are open to the public. Yann Martel, Canadian author of the Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi will attend, along with Shobha Dé—India's answer to Jackie Collins—and Indonesian literary dissident Pramoedya Ananta Toer. (Nobel prizewinner V.S. Naipaul was scheduled to attend but begged off with a literary excuse—he's busy writing.)

The local talent is a little less lustrous, but that actually proves the genius behind the festival. Co-founders Jane Camens and Nury Vittachi, both literary-minded journalists, envisioned cosmopolitan Hong Kong as the perfect center in which to showcase "great writing with Asian roots," a category that can include just about anything with a gloss of soy sauce: expats writing Asia-based historical fiction, hyphenated Asians getting back to their roots, nonfiction writers discovering the region. Not to mention the proliferating literary output from the other side of the border with mainland China. Asian books are hot in the literary capitals of New York and London, and regional publishers are priming their presses for local authors. "It's all getting up to an international standard," says Vittachi. If Hong Kong can't produce Asia's greatest literature, the city can do the next best thing: celebrate it.