Few literary festivals anywhere were as ill-fated as Hong Kong’s in 2003. It got underway just as the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) was migrating from southern China to Hong Kong.
V.S. Naipaul, among others, cancelled a fortnight before the event. One panel discussion stood out for its topsy-turvy before and after.
An obscure Turkish writer also pulled out because of SARS, which had a much higher fatality rate than covid, leaving the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen and a British writer, widely discredited for his coverage of the HIV epidemic, as the only two writers on the panel.