The Script Road Literary Festival – Macao – October 2023

Posted: October 3rd, 2023 | No Comments »

The Script Road – Macau Literary Festival once again welcomes guests from abroad

Writers from the Greater Bay Area and the Lusophone world will be in Macau from October 6 to 15 for the 12th Macau Literary Festival. Chinese authors Deng Yiguang and Fu Zhen, and Portuguese authors Francisco José Viegas and Valério Romão are among the guests. Alongside contemporary literature, tributes will be paid to great names of the past including: Camões, Shakespeare, W.H. Auden, J.R.R. Tolkien. The Festival opens with a session celebrating the centenary of Henrique de Senna Fernandes.

After three editions, between 2020 and 2022, in which the pandemic forced The Script Road – Macau Literary Festival to feature only local authors, this year’s event marks the return of guests from abroad. Francisco José Viegas is the only foreign participant who has been to The Script Road before, in 2015. He returns to talk about his most recent crime novels, Melancholia and Light in Beijing, and also to present two works from the Quetzal publishing house he runs: The Game of Hide and Seek, a posthumous novel by Fernando Sobral previously published in fascicles by Hoje Macau newspaper; and Journeys Around the World, by the Count of Arnoso, which portrays Macau and China at the end of the 19th century.

Also coming from Portugal are Valério Romão and Patrícia Portela, two young writers who have in common the originality of their works and a substantial knowledge of Macau. António Caeiro, another guest, is a veteran of journalism with many years of work in China. At the Festival he will present his latest work, The Refugees of Shanghai.

The Greater Bay Area will be represented by important names in Chinese literature. Deng Yiguang, an ethnic Mongolian writer born in Chongqing and now based in Shenzhen, is an author who has already been awarded the Lu Xun Literary Prize, one of the most important in China. His novels have been translated into several foreign languages and have often been adapted into films. Fu Zhen, a native of Nanchang, Jiangxi, now based in Hong Kong, is one of the most influential writers of the new generation. She comes to Macau to talk about her first novel, Zebra, as well as the various travel books she has published. Wang Weilian is another of China’s most talented young authors. He was awarded the Mao Dun Literary Prize for Newcomers and the gold medal in China’s most important literary competition for science fiction. He comes from Guangzhou, as does Zhu Shanbo, author of several historical novels and short story collections.

Xiao Hai, now living in Beijing, is a representative of so-called Chinese workers’ poetry, a literary genre that is making a resurgence in China. At The Script Road, he will be sharing a session with Valério Romão, who has recently been working on this theme in a performative way. Sara Ferreira Costa, a Portuguese poet, writer, and translator, has been involved in the organization of the Festival previously, and is now back as a guest. She will present her poetry and lead a workshop on translating Chinese poems. She will also coordinate a free poetry session at Vasco’s bar at the Artyzen-Grand Lapa hotel.

This year, The Script Road – Macau Literary Festival will be based, initially, at the Portuguese Bookshop, from October 6 to 8, and then at Casa Garden, the headquarters of the Orient Foundation, over the weekend of October 13 to 15. Both venues will also host several authors from or based in Macau including: Joe Tang, Erica Lei, Yang Sio Mann, Isaac Pereira, Rui Rasquinho, Rui Farinha Simões, Paulo Cardinal, José Basto da Silva, Marisa C. Gaspar, Andrew Pearson, Tim Simpson and Joshua Ehrlich. The latter, a historian, will present his recently published work on the British East India Company, in the very same location that once served as its headquarters, Casa Garden.

With the fifth centennial of the birth of the great Portuguese poet Luís Vaz de Camões fast approaching – some time in 2024 – writer and journalist Carlos Morais José, director of Hoje Macau, will be interviewing Edward Wilson-Lee, professor at Cambridge University and author of A History of Water – a biography of Camões that narrates in parallel the life of another Portuguese adventurer, Damião de Góis.

The British author is a specialist in Renaissance literature and will join fellow University of Macau professors Glenn Timmermans and Nick Groom in celebrating another important milestone in the history of literature: the publication, 400 years ago, of the first book entirely dedicated to the dramaturgy of William Shakespeare – First Folio. In other sessions of the event, Timmermans will evoke the figure of the British poet W.H. Auden, and Groom will present the most recent edition of his book on the work of J.R.R. Tolkien.

The centenary of the birth of Henrique de Senna Fernandes marks the Festival’s opening session through the launch of the first book of essays on the writings of the celebrated Macanese storyteller. The session will be directed and coordinated by Lola Xavier and Pedro d’Alte, both professors at the Polytechnic University of Macau. Miguel de Senna Fernandes, the honouree’s son and also a Macau author, will participate in the first panel session.

Before this session, and immediately after the opening ceremony of the 12th Macau Literary Festival, the first solo exhibition of paintings by American artist Benjamin Hodges, an academic who has lived in Macau for several years, will be inaugurated at the Portuguese Bookshop Gallery. Photography, another art form that has had a place in every edition of the Macau Literary Festival, will once again be present through the launch of books by Rusty Fox and Francisco Ricarte, and the release of the sixth issue of Halftone magazine.

In the field of music, The Script Road is bringing the show Guerrilla Samba, conceived by Brazilian musician and poet Luca Argel, to the Broadway Theater in Macau. The concert explores some of the most dramatic episodes in Brazilian history, also in the voice of Angolan actress Nádia Yracema and in the strokes of Portuguese illustrator António Jorge Gonçalves.

Organized since its first edition by Ponto Final newspaper and Sociedade de Artes e Letras, The Script Road – Macau Literary Festival is supported by the Macau Government’s Culture Development Fund, as well as several other institutions and companies in the Macau SAR.

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