At Hong Kong Book Fair, Wilbur Smith, Simon Winchester and Hannah Rothschild field questions

The open public forum of the 2016 edition of the Hong Kong Book Fair was, as ever, a lively affair – it could hardly fail to be, with a characteristically blunt David Tang moderating the question and answer session.

Although only a tiny percentage of visitors to one of the world’s best-attended book fairs come for the English-language books, there was still a packed house at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre to hear the thoughts of three authors: the prolific, best-selling writer of historical swashbucklers, Wilbur Smith; journalist and narrative non-fiction writer Simon Winchester; and relatively new author Hannah Rothschild, who has produced one biography and, last year, her debut novel.

Winchester, in particular, was full of eye-opening anecdotes. Most notably the 71-year-old British writer told the tale of his first agent Charles Monteith’s practice of giving unsolicited novels to a middle-aged woman called Maud to read. After she dismissed one of them as “a load of rubbish about kids on an island”, Monteith decided to read it anyway over the weekend, and “gave William Golding a call on Monday”.

Winchester hit the big time in 1998 with The Surgeon of Crowthorne, the story of the Oxford English Dictionary and its convicted-murderer contributor W.C. Minor, and has since written books about everything from the impact of natural disasters to the life of Sinophile British scientist Joseph Needham. He added that his greatest mentor had been Welsh writer James Morris, whose 1958 book Coronation Everest, an account of the Tensing-Hillary Everest expedition, had inspired him to become a writer after he’d picked it up at random while working as geologist in Uganda, a job he said he was very bad at. Winchester said he wrote to Morris, was told he had to give up his job and get work as a journalist, then write back – and promptly did so, taking Morris by surprise.