The fairy tale of how a tete-a-tete gave birth to a giant - Asia's biggest literary festival
In late 1999, as the world readied itself for celebrations of millennial proportions, two literary-minded Hongkongers, Sri Lanka-born journalist and author Nury Vittachi and Indonesian-Chinese novelist Xu Xi, made a 'horrible discovery'.
Vittachi had noted that in all the 'great books of the 20th century' lists being published on the cusp of the 21st century, there appeared virtually no references to Asia.
Mindful of a regional surge of interest in Asian literary voices, both writers saw the need to redress this cultural imbalance.
A determined Xu Xi moved to New York to network with Asian-American authors, and Vittachi went into extracurricular overdrive from his newsroom day job to conceive, produce, and launch Dimsum, a distinctly Asian-flavoured literary journal that later became The Asia Literary Review.
An early Dimsum issue contained a short story by Australian Jane Camens, who expressed the view that Hong Kong could have a festival along the lines of the great writers' celebrations that regularly took place in Melbourne and Sydney. Duly, Vittachi and Camens got around to talking about organising such an event here, but initially found themselves walking into a fog of scepticism.