Exciting chapter for women's writing

"Putting the spotlight on female writers this year is vital. We aspired to give audiences a chance to discover the extraordinary value of women's writing and cultural production," he said.

Portuguese writer Lidia Jorge, one of the guest speakers for the launch ceremony, said that "our life is created through writing. We must write our own lives and the most important thing for women is to find our own perspectives to write. In a long time in the past, women couldn't write, so their life was created through men's eyes. But now things have changed".

"To write is to use our eyes to see and to describe the common things among human beings. Women's writing matters to the entire human race," she said.

There have been a lot of movements in Europe, in Portugal, so that women can use their own words to narrate their own life, she said.

"But there are still a lot of places that women have not touched and explored," she said.

Another guest speaker, Chinese writer Xu Xiaobin, the author of Crystal Wedding and Feathered Serpent, said to maintain creativity, woman writers should open their secret paths of mind to connect with the outside world, to draw nutrition from philosophy, natural sciences, art and life itself.