Authors show Beijing what the Scots have got
By CHITRALEKHA BASU (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-03-19 09:37
 |
Large Medium Small |
Cathy Cassidy's homepage is overflowing with comments from ecstatic young fans whom she met in Beijing last week.
Young readers sold on the charm of Cassidy's teen heroines, who tackle real-life crises and learn through their mistakes, simply couldn't get enough of the Scottish author at school visits and writing workshops.
Cassidy says she's "as happy to learn as teach". While the tremendous size of her fan base in Beijing turned out to be a revelation, the workshops she gave in the city have raised her hopes about a Chinese winning the writing competition run on her website, www.cathycassidy.com.
"It is open to young readers all around the world, and yet we've never had a winner from China. Hopefully that could well change soon," Cassidy says.
Cassidy is one of the four Scottish writers brought to China by the Bookworm International Literary Festival 2010. BILF has, traditionally, been slightly partial toward Scots. That Jenny Niven, the festival director, happens to be a Scot with a degree in Scottish literature is only one of the reasons.
"The Scots are by nature wanderers, and so it's a rare international festival that does not have a strong showing of Scottish authors," Niven remarks.
From Walter Scott to JK Rowling, Scottish writers represent an incredibly diverse and bounteous tradition on the world map of literature.
"They feel at home promoting their work beyond Scotland's shores," Niven says.
Leading the Scottish delegation is BILF-veteran Liz Niven, a poet, educationalist, creative writing instructor and hands-on participant in Scots-language development programs. Niven, who won BILF's Literary Death Match last year, is back to launch her new collection of poems, The Shard Box.
A gift from her son, then a Beijing-resident, sparked the idea. In the 1980s, fragments of fine porcelain were set into box lids and jewelry. This struck Liz Niven as a particularly poignant metaphor for "things that disintegrate, fall apart, then attempt to become whole. This might apply to families, communities and nations".
Her poetry combines the lilting notes of Scottish bagpipes with the earthy regional cadence of the language, even when she is writing about ostensibly un-poetic themes, such as Britain's Foot-and-Mouth Disease epidemic.
"Scotland can be written about in many ways apart from the tartan and shortbread image - though these are great to write about, too!" Liz Niven says.
An admirer of Chinese poet Bei Dao's works, some of which she has translated into Scots, Liz Niven is keen to "explore any potential collaborations with other artists, either translations or with another art form" during her stay in China.
Louise Welsh and her partner Zoe Strachan say they would have loved to take a panda back home to Glasgow. Welsh, who writes dark psychological thrillers, doesn't rule out returning to Beijing to research a future novel.
There's no knowing when inspiration might strike, given that her novel The Bullet Trick was prompted by a trip to Berlin. And the opening sections of Tamburlaine Must Die, where Marlowe wanders through an ancient British forest, were inspired by walks in the Forest of Fontainebleau in France.
Zoe Strachan writes about female sexuality and the way it is constructed in popular imagination and the media. She says she's looking forward to "the history, the food, the art scene, the culture, the shopping and, of course, meeting lots of new people" during her first time in Beijing.
Recently, the author of the novels Negative Space and Spin Cycle was commissioned to write a short story based on a photograph taken in a Chinese city.
Although slightly daunted by China's sheer population- having come from a country of 5 million - Strachan says she wouldn't be surprised if by next year she pens "a novel spanning time zones".