What has caused a bitter public wrangle in London is that Beijing not only chose—with the full approval of the fair itself and of the British Council—which writers to bring to the fair. In a disturbing repeat of what happened at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2009, it also excluded some of China’s best-known writers. Among these are two Nobel Prize winners: Gao Xingjian, China’s only Literature Prize laureate, who lives in nearby Paris, and Liu Xiaobo, the Peace Prize winner who is now serving out an eleven-year prison sentence. More scandalous still, not one of China’s diaspora poets and novelists was invited, even though most of the country’s most distinguished writers live abroad...
To compensate for the absence of dissident Chinese authors, the delegation running the Romanian stall offered their space to exiled Han, Tibetan, and Uighur writers, so they could enter the hall. Ma Jian spoke. “There are 118 Chinese publishers here; all are mouthpieces of the Communist Party. The writers they have invited are considered beautiful by the Party. No ugly person, like those of us here, can speak officially. We don’t object to the writers who are invited, but until all of us are free to speak and write no Chinese writer is free.” John Ralston-Saul, President of PEN International, also spoke, noting that thirty-five Chinese authors are in prison, some for many years, and that more than a hundred have been detained...
For her part, Susie Nicklin, the British Council’s director of literature, told the Observer that the writers approved and invited by Beijing are more representative because “they live in China and write their books there,” in contrast with “other writers who have left.” To this, Yang Lian, probably China’s leading poet, who lives in London, told me: “What’s happening is that countries are becoming companies. And that’s what the British Council is already, just a company co-operating with the Chinese company.
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