The National Culture and Arts Foundation of Taiwan collaborated with the magazine Wenhsun at the end of last year and published a list of finalists for the “Twenty Chinese Novels 2001-2015” in Novel Gravity: International Communication Platform for Chinese Literature. It included ten Chinese novels from Taiwan and ten from other countries and regions, with Shanghai, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Malaysia each contributing two novels.
The two novels from Macau were All Seeing Eye (unofficial translation) from Lawrence Lei, and Kitty Leung’s Me and my… (unofficial translation). The organizers selected novels published between January 2001 and June 30, 2015. They invited authors, experts and editors from Taiwan, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and Malaysia to make recommendations and select the nominees. Among those nominees, 14 were from Macau and two were eventually picked.
Macau has been enjoying a boom period in terms of novel creations in recent years. In 2008, the Macau Foundation and the Pen of Macau co-organized the first Macau Novel Contest. The Foundation also collaborated with the China Writers Publishing House and the Chinese Literature Foundation to publish the first Macau Literature Series. These have provided writers in Macau with a valuable publishing platform for novels, as well as fostering the publishing of a large amount of local literary creations. More of the nominees of the “Twenty Chinese Novels 2001-2015” were in fact from the above two activities. The two selected novels even won awards at the Macau Novel Contest.
This column has previously introduced Lawrence Lei and his All Seeing Eye. As for Kitty Leung, she has been working in literary creation for years and has been producing works that are consistent in terms of quality and quantity. Her Me and my… adopts Macau as the story’s background and the idea of a parallel universe to build her story: “using the death of the main character’s twin sister and parents, the author makes comparison between life and death, as well as stimulating readers’ contemplation on life” (a quote from the “Twenty Chinese Novels 2001-2015” introduction).
Macau literary creations can step onto the global Chinese literature stage thanks to the platform of Novel Gravity. It is just as its introduction states: “To help integrate high quality Taiwanese novels into the world” and “to allow outstanding novel creations to compete with each other through the communication and encouragement of Chinese language media, novelists, commentators and editors”.
Through outside assistance, the quality of local literature can be improved. There has been a considerable amount of literary creations in recent years and the quality is decent as well (of course, I am expecting works of even higher quality in the future). But at the same time, Macau literature needs to go deeper and needs a better platform in order to increase the exposure of the exceptional works so that they can be seen and discussed. This can both strengthen the literary atmosphere of society and stimulate readers’ interests to turn Macau literature into a lively stream.
