Next year’s Taipei International Book Exhibition will feature New Zealand as its theme nation, the Taipei Book Fair Foundation said yesterday.
New Zealand writers, including Eleanor Catton and Lloyd Jones, are scheduled to attend the event, the foundation said.
Catton’s second novel, The Luminaries, won the Man Booker Prize last year, while Jones’ 2006 novel Mister Pip won the Kiriyama Prize in fiction.
Special effects experts who worked on the epic film series The Lord of the Rings have also agreed to appear at the fair to share stories about making the movies — if they can come up with the money for the trip, foundation director Huang Pao-ping (黃寶萍) said.
The New Zealand pavilion plans to present publications that showcase the country’s literature, culture, arts, history, architecture and Maori culture, the foundation said.
Meanwhile, to promote reading among young people, the Ministry of Culture said that youngsters between the ages of seven and 18 are to be admitted to the annual book fairs for free, beginning with next year’s exhibition.
“We hope to attract more people to the annual exhibition,” Huang said, adding that she hoped the new measure would benefit both younger readers and publishers.
The Taipei International Book Exhibition is one of Asia’s largest book fairs. More than 1,000 publishers, writers, illustrators and others in the publishing sector from around the world participated in this year’s fair, held in February.
Next year’s exhibition is to be held from Feb. 11 to 16.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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