Walser shares literature's goals

"Politics and media make us possessors of information, while literature teaches us how to utilize it," 82-year-old German writer Martin Walser said at the 21st Century Annual Best Foreign Novel awards ceremony last week at Peking University.

In his keynote speech, Literature as Information Deliverer, Walser said: "We have the right to value a most important function of literature: Literature delivers information about ourselves."

This was because writers express their emotions through the characters and readers see their lives in the books, he said.