LAHORE: One of very interesting sessions on the second day of the Lahore Literary Festival on Saturday had writers from Germany, Portugal, Austria and Pakistan discussing whether money mattered for the creative persons, especially those in the literary world.

T he session calle d, Ar t, Rebellion and Subversion: Does Money Matter?, had Lucy Fricke, Teresa Nicolau, Clemens Berger and Hira Wasti. It was moderated by novelist Awais Khan.

German writer Lucy Fricke termed money the most important thing as so many things depended on it like academic background, the family one grew up in, and intellectual and social background. `If you grow up in a poor family with no academic background and education, it`s really hard to become a writer`.

She said it`s a big topic for her whole her life because she had to struggle a lot as she realized that `you are an outsider if you grew up without any money, you get a bad education in Germany and if you had to grow up with poor people around. Your schooling depends on where you live. The whole network around you, your friends are often of the same class.

She said now she moved with other people who came from a different class and the upper class people like doctors, professors and curators. `I still have the feeling that in the literature scene I am kinda an outsider because there arestill so many things to learn because I did not get them from my family,` she argued.

Ms Fricke went on to say that money meant time also as if one worked in a factory for eight or nine hours a day, one would feel really tired when they would go home. `It is a romantic idea to do such a job and go back home and start writing your novel about capitalism which is not possible.` She considered the network also very important as a lot of people go up with the network and all the contacts. To get into the literary scene in Germany is very hard as nobody is coming out of the blue, she said and declared that `In Germany, class defines your life`.

Portuguese writer Teresa Nicolau came up with a counterargument, asking the pertinent question whether money could make artists.

She said if money was that important why we had so many writers coming from poor families and society but they were so great. She gave the example of José Saramago, the Nobel laureate from Portugal who was very poor but a great author. `It is easier to have money to be an intellectual, to study but even Stephen King was working hard in his 20s and 30s when he was trying to write and publish his book but nobody was accepting it. He was working in a factory all day long and just trying to be an author at midnight. Now he is a great writer and a very rich man.` Giving an example of Portugal, she said they had Fernando Pessoa who was acommon employee but turned out to be a great poet in Portuguese language. He had to work daily to be a poet, she said.

Teresa said she was honoured to meet some authors who did believe in fiction and imagination and that made them so special. She said that in this changing world, the scary part for writers and artists was not money but lack of freedom to talk because courage and values were permanent. `You can have artists and musicians with values who still sell a lot and the question is do artists have enough places to exhibit their work.

Hira said publishing a tweet was easier than publishing a book as the latter involved hectic rounds of editing. `The newsrooms across America have made social media policies where workers are reprimanded by their employers for their social media posts.` She said there was freedom on social media but there was also censorship if you were working for an institution which had a chilling effect on the writing community.

Austrian author Clemens Berger said when he started writing there was no social media and they still had landlines and now he was seeing young writers performing on social media and Instagram and he found it challenging. He said any social media user or bloggers with 30,000 followers was seen as somebody who could help one in getting fame. He said he still had to learn whether it could help one in book sales. Irfan Aslam