Ma Jian and Flora Drew with Boyd Tonkin - World Literature Weekend

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.