The Beijing Bookworm Turns 10

Amazing to think the Beijing Bookworm has been ten years up those steep, steep steps of Nan Sanlitun! And so a brief trip down memory lane….

In those ten years I got to be on quite a few panels as well as moderating a host of great writers including Louise Welsh on Naming the Bones, Carol Birch on Jamrach’s Menagerie, Chris Womersley on Bereft, Qiu Xiaolong on Inspector Chen, Guy Delisle on Pyongyang, Michel Faber on The Crimson Petal and the White, Barbara Demick on North Korea, Catherine Sampson on Robin Ballantyne, Ridley Pearson on writing multiple bestsellers, Jonathan Fenby on warlord China and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir on Icelandic crime among others….

Plus, over the years, the Bookworm invited me to talk about foreign journalists in China, Carl Crow, the old Peking Badlands, Midnight in Peking and the Pamela Werner murder (which was originally a short story in the Bookworm’s own 2008 publication Beijing: Portrait of a City) and even Andre Malraux’s Man’s Fate one year. Penguin China kindly launched Midnight in Peking on the roof one hot August night and, after I decided to adapt Lao She’s short story Ding into a one-man monologue, we transformed the stage area into a Qingdao beach for a night!!

Chatting with Carol Birch about her novel Jamrach’s Menagerie in 2012

Talking murder, mayhem, opium and all round Peking Badlands badness…

With Qiu Xialong and Cathy Sampson talking criminal minds in 2009

Up on the roof launching a book one hot August night in 2012

You have to admit local actor Wang Xuankun was up for it to play Lao She’s Ding…on his own, with my script, in his trunks!!

Clearly one of the more bizarre performances to graze the stage of the Bookworm in the last decade!!