Hong Kong's cultural influencers on the trends in 2015

We ask people from Hong Kong's arts and entertainment sectors to gaze into a crystal ball and predict what trends are likely to be seen in the city's cultural scene this year.

While both production and consumption of English-language books remain a minority interest in Hong Kong, the Chinese-language market will continue to be buoyant, according to the local literary community. And when it comes to fostering a culture of literary appreciation, the city is also heading in the right direction.

"We've just come out of a period of so many literary events, festivals and visiting writers, including people like Paul Theroux and David Sedaris," says author Xu Xi, who also runs the creative writing course at City University.

"It made me think about how much bigger the literary scene is in Hong Kong. There are significantly more publishers, so there's more of a venue for local writers. There are more literary journals, more university courses, and a bilingual undergraduate course at Baptist University, plus [poet and professor] Bei Dao at Chinese University has brought major international voices here, including in English. You can't have a literary scene without writers, and this city didn't encourage them - that's changed."

Martin Alexander, editor-in-chief of the Asia Literary Review, agrees that there's increased vibrancy in our literary scene, pointing to the growing number of literary events, publishers and English-language bookshops, and improvements to university courses and to the Hong Kong International Literary Festival, "which feels like it's really starting to go somewhere".