In full flight: Erica Jong

Erica Jong - author of the 1973 best-selling novel - posed the following question last month on Twitter: "When you have your 15 minutes of fame, you're very busy, but what happens after?"

For Jong, 71, what happened after are four additional decades of success. To date, she has published 22 books, including seven volumes of poetry. She has edited an anthology, .

- a groundbreaking exploration of female sexuality that caused a scandal in its day - has sold 27 million copies, and her publisher will reissue a 40th anniversary edition in October. As for her personal life, she has been married four times and has a daughter, author Molly Jong-Fast.

"I thought I would be a doctor, an artist and a writer," the New York-based writer says when asked about her childhood dreams. "I came from a family of painters and always painted. I gave up pre-med after trying to dissect a fetal pig in zoology class. I've always written."

This week, Jong will be speaking at the Hong Kong Book Fair as part of the panel "How and What and Why do Writers Write?" alongside Jung Chang and William Shawcross.

The first time I heard of Jong, I was in a university literature seminar during the late 1990s. Perhaps we were discussing Charlotte Bronte or Jane Austen or Jean Rhys - there were very few women on our reading list even though the professor was a woman.