If one pays enough attention, it’s possible to identify, with a certain level of regularity, a spark of talent here and there, in different people, from different fields. At the same time, you don’t need to be a talent scout to know that only a few of those talents will ever actually succeed. That’s the story of mankind – potential being wasted for different reasons, one of the most common being the inability to combine a natural gift with hard work.
With the unique exception of true geniuses (they do exist from time to time), having a natural ability is simply not enough to prosper and succeed, if that ability is not developed, if the one who has it doesn’t pursue the goal of becoming better. And just as having talent is not necessarily the key to success, having good ideas is not enough if you really want to create something meaningful. Again, effort needs to be added.
The combination of good ideas with enormous amounts of hard work has been the successful formula for the accomplishments of The Script Road – Macau Literary Festival. In only five years, the festival has become one of the most relevant literary events in Asia, and only last month, during its 2016 edition, it reached out and touched over 10,000 people, bringing together authors from 11 countries, amongst them U.S. Pulitzer Prize-winner Adam Johnson and Chinese writer Zheng Yuanjie, known as The King of Fairy Tales.
Zheng’s popularity in China, across generations, is a phenomenon worthy of attention, as is Adam’s capacity to offer a glimpse into the secretive world of North Korea with his inventive writing, in his novel The Orphan Master’s Son. CLOSER speaks to both of them in this issue to explore these two diverse and equally rich literary paths.
Speaking of which, you won’t want to miss our Closing Story this month to get to know more about Camilo Pessanha, one of the most important poets to ever live in Macau.
Recent days and weeks have been full of artistic inspiration, not only in Macau with two film festivals coming up; but also in Hong Kong, with Art Basel, Art Central and a top class exhibition by Portuguese street artist Vhils, all hitting the city in the same month, and all featured in the pages of this issue.
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The world is certainly not a fairy tale, but rather a tale where the beauty of creation lives side by side with the horror of violence. We live in a world where at this time Turkey, Belgium and Pakistan have all suffered the effects of terrorist attacks; and a world where the Panama Papers are revealing endless corruption cases involving many people at the top of the international political chain.
Our thoughts must be with the victims of those attacks; and we should praise the reporters who have come together to unveil such a relevant leak as the Panama Papers, something they certainly haven’t achieved without a lot of work. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, as the famous saying goes, so let’s all work a little harder to make this world a better place.
