Writer's Block

What are you reading? Still plowing through that last chapter of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”? Or speed-reading e-mails on your Blackberry? When was the last time you picked up a local novel? Probably never, given the sorry state of our English-language literary scene.

“Anonymity for a writer is destructive,” says Gray, a screenwriter from the U.K. who arrived in Hong Kong in 1991 to discover that local writers were rather complacent about their amateur status. Hence his idea to set up a writers’ group offering feedback to professional and amateur, local and expatriate writers alike. “I think there is a lot more local English writing than there used to be,” adds Gray, who publishes an annual short story collection to get HKWC members’ voices heard. “But at the same time, fewer people are reading!”

Perhaps the most avid readers are the writers themselves. “Material written and published here for the local market is material that is guaranteed not to find a readership, because there is no market. It sells to the small community of writers who buys one another’s books.”

According to Dymocks’ business development manager, Matthew Steele, the proportion of English publications by Hong Kong-based writers is “very low,” despite succesful non-fiction books on our city’s history and culture. “Fiction is very difficult because there are so many other books from across the globe to compete with, making it difficult to stand out. But non-fiction can be very successful,” he says.
The fact that we have more publications about Hong Kong than for Hong Kong is not only visible in chain bookstores. “We can’t publish literary work; the sales wouldn’t make it worthwhile,” says Pete Spurrier, publisher of an independent press, Blacksmith Books. Publishing mainly non-fiction and a small proportion of fiction by non-local writers, Blacksmith Books has an international audience in mind. Though some books experience similar sales in Hong Kong and the U.K., Spurrier emphasizes that their publications focus on providing texts that are “professional with an Asian interest,” which can easily fit on the bookshelves of London or L.A.
Very often, it’s not that publishers aren’t interested in literary works by local writers, they simply cannot afford the low sales. “We have no funding anywhere; we have to go commercial,” says Spurrier, who has become one of the founding publishers of Independent Publishers of Hong Kong (IPHK). Established two years ago, IPHK is a non-competitive collaboration of Hong Kong-based independent presses. Thanks to the joint effort, members of IPHK are able to take part in literary events, such as the Hong Kong Book Fair and the London Book Fair, which would otherwise be unaffordable.

Among the eight members is Sixth Finger Press, initiator of IPHK, which publishes bilingual and translated books. “We bridge the Chinese- and English-language writing worlds, which is often rather divided in Hong Kong,” says publisher Madeleine Slavick, who is also a Hong Kong-based poet.