Taiwan, foreign writers to meet at November festival

Taipei, Oct. 8 (CNA) The 2026 Taiwan Writers Festival will bring together authors and translators from the United States, Australia, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Finland and Poland to meet and hold discussions with their Taiwanese counterparts next month, organizers said Thursday.

From Nov. 6 to 22, participants will join sessions exploring how literature looks back on the past while tackling present-day questions about technology, the environment and social change, said Yen Hung-ya (閻鴻亞), the festival's curator.

"The hope is that encounters among creators from different cultural backgrounds and with different creative approaches will open up more possibilities for discussion and contemplation," said Yen, who goes by the pen name Hung Hung (鴻鴻).

Among the international guests is U.S. author Barbara Demick, according to the National Museum of Taiwan Literature (NMTL), which is organizing the festival.

Her book "Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea" won the United Kingdom's top nonfiction prize, now known as the Baillie Gifford Prize, in 2010, the museum said.

Demick will appear on a panel with China-born journalist Annie Zhang (張潔平) and award-winning Taiwanese journalist Jason Liu (劉致昕) to explore how writers navigate power, crises and truth in their work, the NMTL said in a press release.

Zhang, who has long covered pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong, is now based in Taipei, the museum said.

The NMTL launched the Taiwan Writers Festival last year, with the aim of making it a meeting place for conversation and for imagining the future, according to its website.

The festival will feature performances combining different art forms, talks and film screenings, some of them ticketed and others free. Events will be held at venues in Taipei and Tainan, organizers said.