Hong Kong is an exciting, cosmopolitan and multilingual city - a World City - where Chinese and English are the official languages. The festival aims to encourage reading for pleasure and creative writing in English, stimulating the emergence of more international standard literature from the wider region.

Internationally-acclaimed writers whose work is informed by Asia, acclaimed writers with an Asian background, and emerging writers living in Asia will all take part in the 2004 Hong Kong International Literary Festival. Writers who write in Asian languages and whose work is and available in English have also been invited to this festival.

The Festival is organised by the not-for-profit Hong Kong International Literary Festival Limited, and supported by Man Investments, foreign consulates, universities and schools in Hong Kong, writing and publishing groups, booksellers and the Leisure and Cultural Services Department of the Hong Kong government. Other international arts bodies have also contributed. Additionally, the Festival is been strongly supported by corporate sponsorship.

The Festival's corporate sponsors include Man Investments, Allianz, Northwest Airlines, Paddyfield.com and Mandarin-Oriental.

The Festival, an annual event, aims to take a central role in Hong Kong's cultural development and will:

• Reaffirm Hong Kong's international status by encouraging creative communication in the world's most widely spoken international language.

• Establish Hong Kong as the primary Asian meeting point for authors, publishers and booksellers.

• Encourage, energize and stimulate the use of English among schoolchildren and adults throughout Hong Kong society.

• Provide a fertile environment for locally grown literature in English.

• Provide a focal point for the initiation of public- and private-sector sponsored programmes to invest in the development of English-language usage in Hong Kong and East Asia (e.g. through Writer Fellowships and Writer-In-Residence programs that support young and emerging writers).