Banned award-winning poetry needs to be ‘standardized’ and consider national security: culture chief

The culture minister claimed today that the government holds the right to decide if a literary work should be given an award based on whether it complies with laws and ethic codes. This came in response to three local poetry pieces, which originally won prizes and were pulled from a Hong Kong literature award.  

“If a recommended work fails to meet the standard, the government will consider the cancellation of its prizes,” said Secretary for Culture, Sports and Tourism Kevin Yeung Yun-hung on Thursday morning.  

His speech came after the 16th Hong Kong Biennial Awards for Chinese Literature, organized bi-annually by Hong Kong Public Libraries, released the award list on October 24.   

The Biennial Award and the Recommended Prize for the Poem Category were not on the list, which was meant to be one of the five categories of the Awards, as three works that were initially given these awards were previously banned from Hong Kong library shelves.  

“Not each time for the Literature Awards to present all the award categories,” Yeung claimed, “as the Leisure and Cultural Services Department will evaluate the recommended works cautiously.”  

He didn't comment on the cancellation of the award grant but mentioned that “law enforcement will take actions of any relevance to national security.”

“However, the literary industry should not worry if they hold the ‘right understandings to the country,’” he noted.  

Yeung added that the Leisure and Cultural Services Department has a set of standardized principles for book collections in public libraries that will consider the legitimacy of a book and its effect on readers.  

In November last year, the three works of poetry - written by Hong Kong poets Chow Hon-fai, Tsang Wing-chung, and Raymond Chan Li-choi - were announced to be taken out of Hong Kong Public Libraries, with the release date of the Literature Awards also being postponed to this October from last year.  

It is also learned that Chow’s work referred to Umbrella Movement and one of Tsang’s poems mentioned the death of Chinese activist Liu Xiaobo.