Macao Literary Festival – 21-30 March

Posted: March 5th, 2025 | No Comments »

The fourteenth Macau Literary Festival will take place from 21 to 30 March and will once again focus on poetry, as it did in 2019. The event also returns to the waterfront of Barra, in the Inner Harbour.

In a concert scheduled for the 29th, the Lisbon Poetry Orchestra will make its debut in Macau, presenting the show The Surrealists and bringing special guest Xana, the lead singer of Rádio Macau. The first part of the concert features a performance by Poetry & Music, a band led by Anthony Tao, the former organiser of the Beijing Literary Festival. Theme of the performance: Writing Myth.
Among the Chinese poets who will be present at the festival, the name of the young Xu Jinjin stands out. She is an interdisciplinary artist who shares her time between Shanghai and New York, where she has already exhibited her work at the Museum of Modern Art. Her poetic work has received several awards, namely from the Poetry Society of America. She is joined by Valério Romão, from Portugal, Zang Di and Jia Wei, from Beijing, Chan Ka Long and Wang Shanshan, from Macau, among other poets invited by the Script Road Festival.
Poetry recitals, launch of new books, debates and workshops take place in the Old Barra Slaughterhouse Site, which is currently under the management of the MGM Macau Group, one of the festival’s main sponsors. The event also continues to enjoy the support of the Macao SAR Government’s Culture Development Fund and many other public and private institutions based in Macau.
The Society of Arts and Letters and Praiagrande Edições, co-organisers of the festival, celebrates the 100th anniversary of the publication of Lin-Tchi-Fá, Flor de Lótus, a book of poems by Maria Anna Acciaioli Tamagnini, by releasing new translations into Chinese and English.
This year’s Script Road marks the 50th anniversary of the independence of Portuguese-speaking African countries with an exhibition by photojournalist Alfredo Cunha, who covered these historic events. The theme of the end of the colonial war and the decolonisation process that followed is also present in João Ricardo Pedro’s novel O Teu Rosto Será o Último, which Luís Filipe Rocha adapted for the cinema. The director returns to Macau after having directed here in the late 80s the TDM programme department and filmed Amor e Dedinhos de Pé, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Macanese writer Henrique de Senna Fernandes.
Still on the same theme, António Costa Silva, writer, poet and essayist, and Portuguese Minister for the Economy and the Sea between 2022 and 2024, is presenting in Macau his novel Desconseguiram Angola, about a period half a century ago, when the Angolan nation was being built in the midst of a fratricidal war.
Chinese novels are also well represented at the festival by by Chen Jining, vice-president of the Guangdong Writers’ Association. Throughout his career he has collected numerous literary honours, including the Annual Chinese Literature Award for Best Novelist, the People’s Literary Award and the China Good Book Award, among others. Seven Steps Town and Monologue Out Loud are two of his most notable novels.
This year, the main vehicle for non-fiction is English. British writer Paul French brings his two latest works to Script Road: Her Lotus Year, a biography of Wallis Spencer, later Duchess of Winsor, focusing on the time she spent in China in the 1920s; and Destination Macao, a collection of stories about some of Macao’s most fascinating 19th and 20th century personalities. Tony Banham from Hong Kong presents the results of his research into the sinking of the Lisbon Maru, one of the most tragic mistakes made by the Allied forces during the Pacific War. And Thomas DuBois, a Beijing-based author, presents China in Seven Banquets, a recently-released in-depth study of the history of Chinese cuisine.
The books for the youngest will be brought to schools by Chen Shige, the first post-1980s writer to win China’s highest honor in children’s literature, and André Letria, a Portuguese illustrator and publisher who has had several of his works published in Chinese. Sophia Hotung, an illustrator from Hong Kong, will also be sharing her art with the Macau public.
On the eve of the Festival’s opening, Wang Zhengping, one of the great masters of Chinese photography, opens the exhibition The Wind Blows on the Grassland at the Tap Seac Gallery, a poetic look at the vast open spaces of Inner Mongolia and those who inhabit them. Rao Yongxia, a disciple of Wang’s, followed in his footsteps and is showing her work a few days later at the Santa Casa da Misericórdia Hostel Gallery.
Over the ten days of the festival, there will be two dozen talks, three exhibitions, a film cycle and a concert, school visits, photography and creative writing workshops, many with simultaneous translation. The detailed programme of the event will be published in the coming days.

For more information, please contact:
Aska Cheong: +853 6622 3215
Kathine Cheong: +853 6688 2821
Media.macauliteraryfestival@gmail.com | Info.macauliteraryfestival@gmail.com

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