Turn-up for the books

Besides He, writers of such standing as Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua, Liu Zhenyun, Mai Jia, Bi Feiyu, Wang Meng and Liu Cixin took to the stage at these events to share their thoughts.

Like He, Bi Feiyu, author of Three Sisters and Massage, also focused on 40 years of progress and his personal experiences as a writer at the Shanghai fair.

Bi was 14 when the reform and opening-up process began. He recalls the days when he and his young peers discovered the new aesthetics of tight-fitting flared trousers.

"It was shocking for Chinese people who were used to hiding their figures under oversized clothes. This was my first gift from the reform and opening-up－to learn to be proud of our bodies, and proud of life itself," Bi says.

Seeing the works of more foreign literary masters on the shelves of his local Xinhua Bookstore was the next gift Bi received as the country continued to open up.

"I'd heard of Alexander Pushkin and Victor Hugo from my father, who was a teacher. On the day I got the chance to read them, I quickly realized the importance of spiritual dialogue－even with past masters－and how they could enrich your understanding of the world," he says.

"Writers like us are not only witnesses to the reform process, but are also a result of it," he adds.

At the Beijing fair, Jia Pingwa, a veteran writer born in 1952 and who debuted in 1974, joined in on a conversation about one of his works with its Spanish editor Elena Bazan, Italian translator Patrizia Liberati and English translator Christopher Payne.

Jia also attended another event with translators Eric Abrahamsen and Nick Stember, and editor Peter Blackstock, who all hail from the United States, where he discusses how almost every Chinese writer of the past 40 years has been in some way influenced by Western literature.

"Chinese literature is one facet of the world literature, and has its own attractions. But the key task for Chinese writing remains to tell stories about the new reality of contemporary China, the complexity of human nature and how Chinese people live and survive," Jia says, adding that he has actively studied comparative literature in the East and West during the 1980s-1990s.

Jia is well received in the domestic market and each of his novels sells at least 300,000 copies. More than this, his works have been translated into 30 languages.

One of his key concerns is to what extent the essential "Chinese flavor"－the emotions, atmosphere, accents and the precision of the language－remains after the works are translated.

In fact, the nature of the translation work can sometimes become a heated topic when Chinese writers sit down with Sinologists and foreign translators who speak a variety of languages.