Saturday 6 March

Leave me Alone, Chengdu - Murong and Harvey Thomlinson
7:30pm

Leave Me Alone, Chengdu is a bitter take on love and life in modern China. The story of three young men, Cheng Zhong, Li Liang and Big Head Wang and their tragic-comic struggles to make their way in Chengdu. The novel was longlisted for the Man Asia Literary Prize in 2008. An unflinching and darkly funny look at the pressures of life in modern China, where riches and sex abound – but not for all. Leave Me Alone, Chengdu is set to intrigue and delight festival audiences.

Murong Xuecun is one of China's more famous contemporary authors. After graduating from Beijing’s University of Political Science and Law he worked in the car industry. When his novel Leave Me Alone, Chengdu (originally published as Chengdu, Jin Ye Qing Jiang Wo Yiwang) took China by storm, Murong gave up his job and devoted himself to writing full time. He has published five novels and Leave Me Alone, Chengdu is his first novel to be translated into English.

Harvey Thomlinson is the founder of Make-Do Publishing, based in Hong Kong. Under its ‘Modern Chinese Masters’ imprint, Make-Do aims to challenge preconceptions about Chinese fiction, and has published English translations of Sheng Keyi, Jimmy Qi and the controversial Fujian writer Chen. He translated Leave Me Alone, Chengdu and his own experimental novel The Strike, based on events in northeast China, was published in the UK literary journal Tears on the Fence.

The Bookworm Chengdu
30 RMB

THE Poetry clinic - Felix Cheong
4pm-6pm

In The Poetry Clinic aspiring poets make an appointment with award-winning poet Felix Cheong, submitting one sample of their poetic work in advance. During the 10-minute consultation, Felix will “diagnose” the pieces and possibly prescribe a “cure”, where appropriate...

For appointments, email peter@chinabookworm.com

The Bookworm Chengdu
30 RMB

Sunday 7 March

Poetic Experiences - Felix Cheong and Scott Ezell
7.30pm

Poets Felix Cheong and Scott Ezell, writers with broad international experiences, read selections of their work chosen to explore their favoured themes and discuss how they turn their life experiences into compelling, imaginative poetry.

Felix Cheong is the author of six books, including four collections of poetry, two teen detective novels and a non-fiction anthology of interviews. He has also written two plays and edited a volume of essays. His latest volume of verse is Sudden in Youth: New and Selected Poems. In 2004, he was nominated for the Singapore Literature Prize and in 2000, he received the National Arts Council’s Young Artist of the Year for Literature Award. He completed his Master of Philosophy in Creative Writing at the University of Queensland and is currently an adjunct lecturer and freelance reporter.

Scott Ezell’s Petroglyph Americana is a book-length poem about the landscapes and communities of the American west, with resonances and reflections from Asian cultures and landscapes. After studying Chinese and Comparative Literature in the US, Ezell worked, travelled and studied for a dozen years in Asia. He lived for three years in an aboriginal community on the Pacific coast of Taiwan, where he began to focus on questions of identity and place and wrote the essay collection A Far Corner. His book The End of China is a cultural travelogue about the far western regions of China. Scott Ezell’s songs and instrumental music have been released internationally, and his paintings have been exhibited in America, Europe and Asia. In 2004, Ezell collaborated with local Beijing artists to produce Urban Hieroglyphics, a performance piece combining improvised painting, music and dance.

The Bookworm Chengdu
30 RMB

Monday 8 March

Borders, Language, Identity - Alberto Ruy Sanchez
7:30pm

In an increasingly globalised, transnational era
Alberto Ruy Sanchez discusses borders, language and complex identities in new writing from the Americas.

A fiction and non-fiction writer, poet and essayist from Mexico City, since 1988 he has served as the editor-in-chief of Artes de México, which has won more than 100 national and international editorial awards. With over 90 issues and 600 writers, the journal has given a voice to diverse points of view on Mexican themes and identity. His most recent publications include Limulus, Visiones del fósil viviente/Visions of the Living Fossil and Nueve Veces el Asombro.

He has published widely in scholarly journals and is the author of several books of literary criticism, including Una introducción a Octavio Paz. Ruy Sánchez’s best known work of fiction Los nombres del aire was translated as Mogador in 2006.

The Bookworm Chengdu
30 RMB

Poems and Lyrics Collide - Scott Ezell
9:30pm

In this special musical treat songwriter and poet Scott Ezell explores the relationship between poems and songs, their similarities and differences. As part of the performance he will read some lyrics as poems, and then sing them with guitar, using a selection of songs that are very close to standing on their own as poems, and others that are more dependent on the form and elements of music.

The Bookworm Chengdu
30 RMB

Tuesday 9 March

Amitav Ghosh - In Conversation
7.30pm

One of India’s best-known writers, Amitav Ghosh is the author of numerous highly acclaimed historical novels set in India and South Asia, including The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In an Antique Land and Dancing in Cambodia.

His epic novel, The Glass Palace, was an international bestseller and sold more than half a million copies in Britain alone.

Ghosh has received France’s Prix Medici Etranger, India’s prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award, the UK’s Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction and a Pushcart Prize. Following Sea of Poppies, he is currently at work on the second book in his Ibis Trilogy. He is one of India’s leading literary lights, whose epic fictions have conjured tales of India, empire and beyond for thousands of readers worldwide in numerous languages. This evening, he shares tales of the writing life, and gives us a peek into his luminous imagination.

The Bookworm Chengdu
30 RMB

Wednesday 10 March

Solo Show: Benjamin Zephaniah
7.30pm

Emerging from the rhythms of Jamaican street and punk politics, Benjamin Zephaniah’s work changed the face of British poetry. Fusing rap, slang, powerful imagery and slammin’ beats, his performances are never the same, and always unmistakably Benjamin Zephaniah. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear him perform, solo, live, specially for festival audiences.

British Jamaican Rastafarian writer and dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah was included in The Times 2008 list of Britain’s top 50 post-war writers. Zephaniah’s poetry emerged from the rhythms of Jamaican street and punk politics. By the time he was 15, he was already known among Handsworth’s Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities. His mission is to fight the dead image of poetry in academia and to “take poetry everywhere”.

The Bookworm Chengdu
30 RMB

Thursday 11 March

Write In The Heart Of Asia - Tash Aw
7.30pm

From the steamy jungles and murky political underworlds of pre-independence Malaysia to Sukarno’s post-colonial purges, Tash Aw’s writing explores the heart of Asia’s most tumultuous periods. A master storyteller and fabulous craftsman, Aw has garnered numerous awards ¨C and legions of fans ¨C for his writing. Join us as we explore his fascinating fiction.

Malaysian writer Tash Aw’s first 2005 novel, The Harmony Silk Factory, won both the Whitbread Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel of the Year, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His second novel, Map of the Invisible World, set in post-Independence Indonesia and Malaysia, was published in 2009. His commentary on South East Asian arts and culture frequently appears on the BBC, and his fiction has been translated into 23 languages.

The Bookworm Chengdu
30 RMB

Friday 12 March

Robert Dessaix: Sex, beliefs and other taboos
In conversation with Graeme Meehan, Australian Embassy, Beijing
7.30pm

Robert Dessaix is an Australian novelist, essayist and journalist. His first book was his autobiography, A Mother's Disgrace which concerns his journey to an alternative sexuality after twelve years of marriage and his meeting with his birth mother. His novels include Night Letters and Corfu, while Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev interweaves a personal travelogue with a biography of Turgenev. He has won numerous awards for his writing, including the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, the Nettie Palmer Prize, and the Douglas Stewart Prize for non-fiction.

The Bookworm Chengdu
30 RMB

Saturday 13 March

Alice Pung: Unpolished Gem
5pm

Australian writer and lawyer Alice Pung’s first book, Unpolished Gem, is a national best-selling memoir about her family’s emigration from China to Australia.

Short-listed for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and the NSW Permier’s Literary Awards, it won the Australian Book Industry’s 2007 Newcomer of the Year Award and was selected for Books Alive 2007 and voted one of Victoria’s Top Five Summer Reads. In 2008, Pung edited the popular anthology Growing Up Asian in Australia. Pung is brought to you by the Australian Embassy Beijing’s 2010 Australian Writers’ Week.

The Bookworm Chengdu
30 RMB

Alexis Wright and the landscape of Australian Aboriginal writing
7:30pm

Alexis Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation of the Southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Her books include Grog Wars, a study of alcohol abuse in the outback town of Tennant Creek, and the novel Plains of Promise, which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize, the Age Book of the Year Award and the NSW Premier’s Award for Fiction. Her most recent novel, Carpentaria, won the prestigious Miles Franklin award in 2007. Set in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance, Carpentaria is the unforgettable portrait of the powerful Phantom family, leader of the Westend Pricklebush people, and its battles with old Joseph Midnight’s renegade Eastend mob on the one hand, and the white officials of Uptown and the neighbouring Gurfurrit mine on the other. Wright is brought to you by the Australian Embassy Beijing’s 2010 Australian Writers’ Week.

The Bookworm Chengdu
30 RMB

Sunday 14 March

Travel Writing Workshop - David Leffman
4pm

Rough Guide China writer David Leffman leads an intensive workshop on writing for guidebooks and travelogues and how to get started in a recession-strapped market. David Leffman first visited China in 1985 and studied Mandarin at SOAS, London, and Sichuan University, Chengdu. Since 1990 he has worked as a travel writer and photographer, co-authoring guidebooks for Rough Guides and Dorling Kindersley to Australia, Indonesia, China, Hong Kong and Iceland. He was also consultant editor on Kylie Kwong’s My China Cookbook. He spends his spare time cooking, hiking, scuba diving and getting beaten around by martial artists.

The Bookworm Chengdu
30 RMB

The Book of the Alchemist – Adam Williams
7:30pm

After three successful novels set in China, novelist Adam Williams turns his attentions elsewhere for his latest book, a fabulous, intriguing story of redemption and courage in a war-torn Andalucia. The Book of the Alchemist has an Arabian Nights flavour that contrasts the enlightened tolerance of Arab Spain with the murderous bigotry of the 1930s.

Adam Williams is a businessman and novelist based in Beijing. His historical fiction trilogy, comprising The Pleasure of Heavenly Pleasure, The Emperor’s Bones, and The Dragon’s Tail follows the fortunes of three generations of an English family, spanning China’s last tumultuous last century from the Boxer Rebellion until the summer of 1989.

The Bookworm Chengdu
30 RMB

Monday 15 March

Tuesday 16 March

Wednesday 17 March

Thursday 18 March

Breaking into novel territory - Louise Welsh and Zoe Strachan
7.30pm

Louise Welsh, one of Scotland’s best known crime writers, and her partner Zoe Strachan, prominent Scottish novelist, share tales of getting published, winning prizes, promoting new work and breaking boundaries as active members of Scotland’s writing community.

Louise Welsh is the author of four novels, The Cutting Room, Tamburlaine Must Die, The Bullet Trick and Naming the Bones, which has just been released. Her first novel, The Cutting Room, won the 2002 Crime Writers Association John Creasey Memorial Dagger. She is the recipient of several awards, the most recent of which is the City of Glasgow Lord Provost’s Award for Literature. Her work has been translated into 20 languages.

Zoe Strachan is the author of Negative Space and Spin Cycle, which won a Betty Trask Award and was short-listed for the Saltire First Book of the Year Award. Strachan also writes short stories, essays, journalism, drama and radio pieces. She has received two writer’s bursaries from the Scottish Arts Council, a Hawthornden Fellowship and was UNESCO City of Literature writer-in-residence at the National Museum of Scotland. She teaches creative writing at Glasgow University, and is currently finishing her third novel, Play Dead.

This event is brought to you by the British Council
The Bookworm Chengdu
30 RMB

Friday 19 March

In Conversation with Amit Chaudhuri
7.30pm

Amit Chaudhuri’s latest novel (his fifth) The Immortals was a New Yorker Book of the Year, and Critics’ Choice, Best Books of 2009, in the Boston Globe and the Irish Times. He is also an internationally acclaimed essayist, and a musician, having performed worldwide as a singer in the Hindustani classical tradition, and as an experimental musician at venues such as the London Jazz Festival and the Brecon Jazz Festival. Among the prizes he has won are the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Society of Authors’ Encore Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Indian Government’s Sahitya Akademi award. He is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was one of the judges of the Man Booker International Prize 2009. He is also the first Indian writer to have had a Guardian editorial written about him, In Praise of Amit Chaudhuri.

The Bookworm Chengdu
30 RMB

Saturday 20 March

SOLO SHOW: Steve Connell
7.30pm

Steve Connell’s performances are the definition of energetic. Dynamic, fluid, high-octane and utterly unique. To go with his back-to-back Los Angeles Slam Championships (2002/2003), Steven Connell won the 2003 National Poetry Slam Championship with his LA team. In addition to being a two-time HBO Def Poet, his work has been featured on ABC World News, Good Morning America, MSNBC’s Hardball and others. Private highlights include performing at Oprah Winfrey’s celebration of Maya Angelou, the Quincy Jones Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Marion Anderson Gala (honoring Maya Angelou/Norman Lear); as well as special events for Senator Hillary Clinton, (special request: Quincy Jones), and President Barack Obama, (special request: Oprah Winfrey). He has worked with and created work for Norman Lear’s Declare Yourself, Rock the Vote, the ACLU, and the Pen Foundation, P.A.V.E., Global Green, and was published in the acclaimed anthology “Why Freedom Matters”. In 2009 he was asked to DC to perform as part of the Inaugural Celebration as well as invited in June to an evening of poetry at the White House. His play The Word Begins (3 Helen Hayes Award nominations) has delighted audiences across America, and most recently a limited run at the renowned New York Public Theater. His hit one-man show 40 Days earned him the Best Solo Performance of 2005 in Los Angeles. He brings with him his first book of poems Better Bound, and his highly regarded spoken word album, “Intimate Nature of Knife Fights”. In April he will World Premier a series of original pieces written for the 1st Annual Amnesty International Human Rights Arts Festival.

The Bookworm Chengdu
30 RMB

Sunday 21 March

Documentary Screenings from the Tibetan Plateau
3pm

Rabsal, a non-profit organisation with a mission to preserve Tibetan culture and empower Tibetans to preserve their own culture, is proud to present two films from the Tibetan Plateau: Summer Pasture and Kham Film-making Training. Summer Pasture is a feature-length documentary about a nomadic couple living with their infant daughter in the high grasslands of eastern Tibet. The couple live in Zachukha (Shiqu) -- nicknamed '5-most (wuzui)' in Chinese for being the highest, coldest, poorest, largest, and most remote county in Sichuan Province. They depend on their herd of yaks for survival, just as their ancestors have for generations. In recent years however, Zachukha has undergone rapid development, which has posed escalating challenges to nomadic life. It provides a deeply personal account of what it means to be a nomad in a swiftly modernising world, and a universal story of family survival. Summer Pasture is the recipient of grants from the Sundance Documentary Fund and International Documentary Association. Kham Film-making Training is a ten-minute documentary that offers a unique glimpse into the lives and ambitions of a group of Tibetan high school students who are discovering photography and film-making. Screenings followed by a questions and answers session with Tsering Perlo and Tomo Hamakawa.

The Bookworm Chengdu
30 RMB

Namu: Leaving Mother Lake
7.30pm

Leaving Mother Lake is the extraordinary story of Yang Erche Namu – a girl from the Musuo ethnic group who grew up in a small village near Lugu Lake in northern Yunnan. It is a place known as the ‘Country of Daughters’ because of its matriarchal society: there is no word for father; property is passed on from mother to daughter; women choose lovers for as long as they like; and men mostly sleep in the stables.

Namu left her remarkable childhood behind for the bright lights of Shanghai and a celebrity career, one that has never shied away from controversy...

The Bookworm Chengdu
30 RMB

Monday 22 March

Tuesday 23 March

Wednesday 24 March

Thursday 25 March

Peter Hessler – In Conversation
7.30pm

Peter Hessler, “one of the Western world’s most thoughtful writers on modern China,” according to The Wall Street Journal is the author of the award-winning China trilogy of River Town, Oracle Bones and the brand new Country Driving.

His autobiographical novel on China, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, about his experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English was a Kiriyama Prize-winning book. He is the former Beijing correspondent for the New Yorker and a frequent contributor to National Geographic, and his work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal. His novel Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present, reflects upon his life in Beijing since 1999 and traces the roots of today’s modern China.

In Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory Hessler embarks on a 7,000-mile trip following the Great Wall, probes the modernization of village life through the eyes of one family, and explores the frenetic industrial boom in a Special Economic Zone to deliver a work of penetrating social reportage that analyses China’s lurch into modernity.

The Bookworm Chengdu
30 RMB

Friday 26 March

Saturday 27 March

Sunday 28 March

Monday 29 March

Through the Looking Glass - PAUL FRENCH
7.30pm

Paul French is a writer and analyst based in Shanghai. His previous books include North Korea - the Paranoid Peninsula, Carl Crow: A Tough Old China Hand, and most recently Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao. He is currently working on a book detailing the horrific and unsolved murder of a young English woman in Peking in 1937 to be published by Penguin in 2011 as A Peking Murder.

In Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao Paul French brings to life the larger-than-life personalities of a bygone China foreign press corps. It offers a sparkling insight into the antics of the foreign hacks, including the opium addicts, concubines, missionaries, spies among them – and provides a window on this tumultuous period and shows what impact they had on the world at the time... both for good and for bad.

The Bookworm Chengdu
30 RMB

Tuesday 30 March

Wednesday 31 March

The Man Who Loved China - Simon Winchester
7.30pm

Simon Winchester OBE is a masterful spinner of historical and scientific sagas and is the author of over 16 books including The Map That Changed the World, the story of William Smith, the 19th-century engineer and father of modern geology; Krakatoa; The River at the Center of the World, about the legendary Yangtze River; A Crack in the Edge of the World, on the Great California Earthquake; and The Professor and the Madman which recounts the unlikely tale of an asylum-bound murderer who helped to write the Oxford English Dictionary. He has also worked as a journalist and travel writer for several publications for more than thirty years.

“He’s a superb historian,” according to Salon, “because he’s a superb storyteller.”

In The Man who Loved China, Simon Winchester takes an up close and personal lohok at the great Sinologist Joseph Needham (1900¨C1995), ¡°the man who made China China¡±, forming the West's understanding of a sophisticated culture with his masterpiece, Science and Civilization in China. In a life devoted to recording the Middle Kingdom's intellectual wealth, Needham, an eccentric, brilliant Cambridge don, made a remarkable journey from son of a London doctor through scientist-adventurer to red scare target. He is also well know for his famous "Needham question," which asks why the country failed to industrialize when Europe did, despite its prior achievements in printing, explosives, navigation, hydraulics, ceramics and statecraft.

This event is brought to you by the British Council
The Bookworm Chengdu
30 RMB