Events at the Shop
Ma Jian and Flora Drew with Boyd Tonkin - World Literature Weekend
Saturday 20 June 2009
Ma Jian’s Beijing Coma, winner of the T. R. Fyvel Index on Censorship Award and shortlisted for the 2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, is a seminal novel about the Tiananmen Square protests. Gao Xingjian, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, has called Jian’s ‘one of the most important and courageous voices in Chinese literature’. As part of the Bookshop’s World Literature Weekend, Ma Jian discussed his novel with the Independent’s literary editor Boyd Tonkin, while Flora Drew translated his comments and read excerpts from the book.
History is Constantly Reawakening
Listen now (22:21)
A reading from Beijing Coma, comparing Tiananmen with Iran, and student protest, innocent optimism and change.
Bringing Literature and History Together
Listen now (24:18)
How Ma Jian’s experiences became this novel, the memory of Tiananmen within China, circulation of Beijing Coma in China itself, reformers and hard-liners.
Audience Questions
Listen now (18:57)
Recorded and edited by Adrian Leibowitz and Brett Wilson
Common Custom:documentary & archive
Ma Jian was born in Qingdao, China in 1953. He worked as a watch-mender and a painter of propaganda boards and was assigned a job as a photojournalist for a state-run magazine. At the age of 30, Ma Jian left work and travelled for three years across China, a journey he later described in his book Red Dust, winner of the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award 2002. He left Beijing for Hong Kong in 1987 but continued to travel to China, notably to support the pro-democracy activists in Tiananmen Square in 1989. After the hand-over of Hong Kong he moved to Germany and then London, where he now lives.
Flora Drew is the translator of Beijing Coma and studied Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She has worked in television and film and has translated Ma Jian’s Red Dust, The Noodle Maker and Stick Out Your Tongue.
Further Reading
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Translation: Making a Whole Culture Intelligible? World Literature Weekend