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Books, literature - Source: Reuters
More than 90 Australian authors have signed a letter decrying China's refusal to grant a visa to one of the country's most celebrated writers because he is HIV-positive, a move that Beijing has defended.
Robert Dessaix, whose 1996 novel Night Letters deals with the European travels of a man diagnosed with an incurable disease, was refused permission by Chinese authorities to attend the International Literary Festival in Shanghai on health grounds.
More than 90 other writers, including Nobel laureate JM Coetzee and Booker Prize winner Thomas Keneally, who penned Schindler's Ark, have rallied to Dessaix's support, demanding a public apology from Beijing.
"This was an act of discrimination that appears to be founded in fear or ignorance and is behaviour unworthy of any nation that desires to be seen as enlightened and civilised," the joint letter says.
"Mr Dessaix, an internationally published and acclaimed author, has been unjustly left out of the Australian government supported Writers' Tour currently under way in China," the group from The Australian Society of Authors writes.
Dessaix's visa refusal follows strains with China over the arrest in Shanghai of an Australian mining executive and Canberra's decision last year to grant a visa to a high-profile Chinese ethnic separatist leader.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, has told reporters in Beijing he was unfamiliar with Dessaix's case and why he was refused a visa, but defended China's rules barring HIV-positive people from entering the country.
"If he is HIV-positive, then based on China's relevant regulations, he cannot enter China. The rules about this are clear," Qin says.
"I hope the Australian side and the author himself will be able to understand this.
"In China, AIDS sufferers and HIV-positive people are respected and their legitimate rights protected".
Dessaix, 65, is the author of the poetic Night Letters and Corfu.
The first novel is based around letters written home from a Venice hotel room, pondering Italian history, philosophy and questions of human fate, including his own.
Dessaix's autobiography, A Mother's Disgrace, was published in 1994.
"I am not a threat. I don't write on political issues. I feel I've been spat on," Dessaix told The Age newspaper.
"I live in Australia and I can come home to a civilised place where people care."
