Lit.Cologne 2010, the Cologne Literature Festival, which began yesterday and runs over eleven days, is billed as Europe’s largest. There will be 175 events and invited guests include Nick Hornby, Siegfried Lenz, Martin Walser, Margaret Atwood and Henning Mankel, not to mention the “controversial” young novelist Helene Hegemann, whose first book, Axolotl Roadkill, caused a stir when it was discovered to feature considerable intertextuality, or as most traditional literary critics saw it, plagiarism.

One of the central themes of the festival is literature in dictatorships. The Chinese writer Liao Yiwu (The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up) was invited to attend but not permitted by the authorities to travel. Today, however (March 11th), Nobel literature laureate Herta Müller will discuss dictatorship and repression with the Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei.