Taipei Literature Festival spotlights past
2015-03-02
Taipei Literature Festival is set to kick off March 1 with the theme of memory and craftsmanship taking showgoers on a literary journey into the past.
The first event in the three-month schedule is a series of forums on five cultural hubs in East Asia: Hong Kong, Malaysia, Seoul, Shanghai and Tokyo. Writers from these locales will discuss the influence of respective cultural, political and social developments on their work.
Next up is a block of 11 lectures featuring film directors, literary critics and writers explaining the role of Taipei in shaping their creative offerings.
Presenters include directors Tsai Ming-ling on “The Skywalk Is Gone,” a short about Taipei Main Station and the need to embrace change, as well as Hsiao Yeh and Wu Nien-jen on Jiufen-centric offerings “The City of Sadness” and “A Borrowed Life.”
Li Yu’s “Stories on Wenzhou Street,” which was the main residential area for intellectuals of the day, is to be discussed by two writers. In addition, Chen Pei-feng, a research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Taiwan History, and poet Hsiang Yang are to talk about three books on Taipei folk lyrics.
April’s focus is a special exhibition on the publishing industry of yesteryear. A total of 13 publishing houses and more than 30 industry figures were visited and interviewed, respectively, to provide an accurate account of the operations of this labor-intensive sector where pens and scissors were of equal importance at the editing desks.
The exhibition’s five categories comprise publishers who introduced world literature and promoted local talents during the nation’s 38 years of martial law; writers elaborating on topics from inspiration to process; editors selecting and working on manuscripts; designers and layout staff on producing higher-quality works; and all on publishing several multivolue anthologies of literature over the decades.
There are also dialogues on the relationship between writers and editors, planners and marketing staff, and designers and publishers.
In May, the focus is Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, renowned for “I Served the King of England,” “The Little Town Where Time Stood Still” and semiautobiographical “Too Loud a Solitude.”
Hrabal published his first collection of short stories “Pearls of the Deep” in 1963 at age 49. This work inspired such Czechoslovakian new wave directors like Vera Chytilova, Jan Nemec and Ivan Passer to interpret his humorous portraits of common people with shorts. In 1968, Hrabal’s “Closely Watched Trains,” adapted by director Jiri Menzel, won Best Foreign Language Film at the 40th Academy Awards.
Interest in the legendary author’s work rekindled in the 1980s with the screenings of “Cutting It Short,” “The Snowdrop Festival” and long-banned “Larks on a String.”
Source: Taiwan Today (http://taiwantoday.tw/ct.asp?xItem=227785&CtNode=413)
