Every other year the International Conference on the Short Story in English brings together writers and scholars with an interest in the short story, creating an unusual forum for a fruitful debate between the practitioners of the art and critical readers, coming from a diversity of fields and sharing a variety of interests.
Writers and readers, bound by their common love for the short story, convene from all over the world. They are interested in exploring the ways and byways of an art that interconnects with other forms of literature as well as with other fields of art (namely photography, painting, cinema, music, and others). They also approach and discuss the variety of ways in which the short story is (and has been) embodied in history and geography, exploring the multiple interweaving links of production and consumption of literary works with the social, political, economic, and other issues relevant to a given time and place.
This year, held at York University, Canada, invited readers included Taiwanese writers Tzheng Ching-wen, Li Ang, Tsai Suh-fen, Chung Wenyin, Chang Ying-tai and Belinda Chang.
Born in 1952, Li Ang grew up in Lu-Kang--a historical town in the central part of Taiwan. She published her first short story “Flower Season” at the age of sixteen. The publication of “Butcher’s Wife” in 1983 established Li Ang as one of the most important contemporary writers in Taiwan. This work, depicting how an impoverished young woman is driven to insanity by patriarchal forces and therefore commits the murder of her abusive husband, has won critical attention from scholars in various countries, including Professor Shozo Fujii from Tokyo University who admired Li Ang so much that he translated and helped publish many of Li Ang’s novels in Japan since the early 1990s. The Nobel Prize winner Mr. Kenzaburo Oe said in one of the interviews that he did not read much Taiwan novel, but he did read and like ‘The Butcher’s Wife.’ While gender politics surfaces strongly in her early writing, Li Ang began to examine the intertwining of gender and politics in the reconstruction of historical narratives after the lifting of martial law (1987) in Taiwan. The publication of four majors novels in the 1990s--including Garden of Riddles (1990), The Incense Burner of Lust (1997 ), Autobiography : A Novel (2000 novel), and The Visible Ghost (2003)—open up new dimensions of gender writing in literature as Li Ang combines critical reflections on postcolonial politics with gender politics to examine the questions of women in Taiwan.
Li Ang read her work slong with acclaimed Canadian writer Margaret Atwood.
More information here.
Writers and readers, bound by their common love for the short story, convene from all over the world. They are interested in exploring the ways and byways of an art that interconnects with other forms of literature as well as with other fields of art (namely photography, painting, cinema, music, and others). They also approach and discuss the variety of ways in which the short story is (and has been) embodied in history and geography, exploring the multiple interweaving links of production and consumption of literary works with the social, political, economic, and other issues relevant to a given time and place.
This year, held at York University, Canada, invited readers included Taiwanese writers Tzheng Ching-wen, Li Ang, Tsai Suh-fen, Chung Wenyin, Chang Ying-tai and Belinda Chang.
Born in 1952, Li Ang grew up in Lu-Kang--a historical town in the central part of Taiwan. She published her first short story “Flower Season” at the age of sixteen. The publication of “Butcher’s Wife” in 1983 established Li Ang as one of the most important contemporary writers in Taiwan. This work, depicting how an impoverished young woman is driven to insanity by patriarchal forces and therefore commits the murder of her abusive husband, has won critical attention from scholars in various countries, including Professor Shozo Fujii from Tokyo University who admired Li Ang so much that he translated and helped publish many of Li Ang’s novels in Japan since the early 1990s. The Nobel Prize winner Mr. Kenzaburo Oe said in one of the interviews that he did not read much Taiwan novel, but he did read and like ‘The Butcher’s Wife.’ While gender politics surfaces strongly in her early writing, Li Ang began to examine the intertwining of gender and politics in the reconstruction of historical narratives after the lifting of martial law (1987) in Taiwan. The publication of four majors novels in the 1990s--including Garden of Riddles (1990), The Incense Burner of Lust (1997 ), Autobiography : A Novel (2000 novel), and The Visible Ghost (2003)—open up new dimensions of gender writing in literature as Li Ang combines critical reflections on postcolonial politics with gender politics to examine the questions of women in Taiwan.
Li Ang read her work slong with acclaimed Canadian writer Margaret Atwood.
More information here.
