The Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival, now in its ninth year, brings together writers from around the world to celebrate the written word, to exchange ideas and to interact with Hong Kong's community of readers and writers. Every year there are Harvard alumni and professors among the luminaries, regional voices and local talents, and this year's line-up has many of note:

Sophie Gee, PhD '02, wrote her doctoral thesis about filth, pollution and satire in the eighteenth century and is the author of The Scandal of the Season, an historical tale of seduction, betrayal and intrigue. Now an assistant professor at Princeton, she teaches classes on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature ranging from Milton to Jane Austen. She will speak at Dim Sum & Then Some and Armchair Traveller on March 11. http://www.harvardhk.org/calendar/detail.asp?RecordId=571

Simon Schama taught history and art history at Harvard for 13 years. He is currently a professor at Columbia University and previously taught at Cambridge and Oxford. His many works on history and art include Landscape and Memory, Dead Certainties, Rembrandt's Eyes, and his history of the French Revolution, Citizens. He is best known for writing and hosting the 15-part BBC documentary series A History of Britain. He will appear at China and Obama's America: The Inaugural Great Financial Times Debate on March 13 at The Four Seasons. http://www.harvardhk.org/calendar/detail.asp?RecordId=573

Nam Le, Fiction Editor of the Harvard Review, was born in Vietnam and was raised in Australia. His book, The Boat (2008), is hailed as one of the most spectacular debut works of fiction in recent years, winning the Pushcart Prize, the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize (2008). He will speak with Travel & Leisure Southeast Asia on Fine Fiction and with the Asia Literary Review on The Year of the Short Story . http://www.harvardhk.org/calendar/detail.asp?RecordId=572

Rebecca MacKinnon, AB '91 is currently writing a book on Internet Freedom and Control: Lessons from China for the World. She is on leave from the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Centre, where she teaches online journalism and conducts research on the Internet, China and censorshop. She co-founded Global Voices (globalvoicesonline.org), a global bloggers' network, and is a founding member of the Global Network Initiativeglobalnetworkinitiative.org, a corporate code of conduct for free expression and privacy. Rebecca will moderate the discussion on Bloggers: Should They Be Taken Seriously? on March 16. http://www.harvardhk.org/calendar/detail.asp?RecordId=574

Janice Y.K. Lee, AB '94, released her first book, The Piano Teacher, an historical novel set in Hong Kong, to critical acclaim from publications as diverse as The New York Times, The Washington Post and People magazine, among many others. It debuted at #11 on The New York Times Bestseller list in January 2009. She will speak on Making a Splash on March 15 and The Female Pen on March 17. http://www.harvardhk.org/calendar/detail.asp?RecordId=575

To register to attend, please visit the Festival web site: http://www.festival.org.hk/2009a/introduction.php

This one seems most relevant to GEI...



She co-founded:
http://www.globalvoicesonline.org - a global bloggers' network,
and is a founding member of the Global Network :
http://www.Initiativeglobalnetworkinitiative.org
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How Global Voices Works:
Global Voices seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online - shining light on places and people other media often ignore. We work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard.

With tens of millions of people blogging all over the planet, how do you avoid being overwhelmed by the information overload? How do you figure out who are the most influential or respected and credible bloggers or podcasters in any given country, especially those outside your own?

Our international team of volunteer authors, regional blogger-editors and translators are your ...

Guides to the Global Blogosphere.

These amazing people are bloggers who live in various countries around the world.
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We have invited them as contributors or hired them as editors because they understand the context and relevance of information, views, and analysis being posted every day from their countries and regions on blogs, podcasts, photo sharing sites, videoblogs - and other kinds of online citizen media. They are helping us to make sense of it all, and to highlight things that bloggers are saying which mainstream media may not be reporting.

For quick hits, check out our Links section, where each weekday our editors link to 5-10 of the most interesting blog posts from their regions. In the Weblog section, our translators, editors, and volunteer contributors post longer features, shedding light on the preoccupations of the blogging communities in their countries

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Primary Goals:
...leveraging the power of citizens’ media...

1/ Call attention to the most interesting conversations and perspectives emerging from citizens’ media around the world by linking to text, photos, podcasts, video and other forms of grassroots citizens’ media being produced by people around the world

2/ Facilitate the emergence of new citizens’ voices through training, online tutorials, and publicizing the ways in which open-source and free tools can be used safely by people around the world to express themselves

3/ Advocate for freedom of expression around the world and to protect the rights of citizen journalists to report on events and opinions without fear of censorship or persecution

The idea for the project grew out of an international bloggers’ meeting held at Harvard in December 2004. (Here’s a written account of the meeting. To listen to an audio report, click here). Global Voices, though headquartered at Harvard Law School, is a co-operative effort of contributors from every continent and dozens of countries.

/see: http://globalvoicesonline.org/about/