Entries for the 16th “Hong Kong Biennial Awards for Chinese Literature” organized by LCSD Hong Kong Public Libraries, were submitted in April 2021, and the competition results would normally be expected to be released in November 2021, but the results for the 16th competition were delayed and were not released until Oct. 24; about a year later.
The published results did not include awards for the “Poetry Category” as the selected winners had been disqualified. In the recently announced list of results, the “Poetry Category” was shown as “absent.”
The poetry collections “Light Hidden in the Dust, The Dark Light, in the Long Fog” and “Commandment and Fellow Practitioners” were recommended by the judges of the biennial awards as the recommended winner and the alternate award winners, respectively, but all were eventually disqualified by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department (LCSD). “Light Hidden in Dust” and “The Dark Light in the Long Fog” were believed to include Hong Kong Social movement issues and its protests, while “Commandment and Fellow Practitioners” was alleged to include the mention of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo….