Off on holiday but leaving you with a good tale – Remembering Shirley Hazzard’s Espionage Career in Hong Kong and Shanghai

I’m off on my holidays for a bit and it’s an internet patchy destination so i’m using the vacation as a chance for a break from posting for a fortnight or so…but will return with lots more old China soon and firm news on new books in 2017 for anyone interested….happy new year and see you in early January. In the meantime i’ll leave you with a link to a great tale set in post-war Hong Kong and Shanghai I recently recalled about the sadly departed Shirley Hazzard….

This December the Australian writer Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) died at 85. For those interested in Asian history her 2003 novel The Great Fire was esepcially pertinent with its descriptions (eye witness ones for Hazzard) of Hong Kong, Shanghai, Japan and elsewhere in the years immediately after the Second World War. I was lucking enough to meet Hazzard at the M on the Bund Shanghai International Literary Festival some years ago when she visited. Here, on the Literary Hub, is an anecdote she recalled on her first visit to Shanghai since 1947 under very different circumstances – as a spy for British Intelligence…..click here….