The Korea Times 2010 Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards is the 41^st annual competition that awards English translations of works of contemporary Korean literature in two categories: fiction (including drama) and poetry.

Applicants may submit one translation of a work of Korean fiction or drama of any length or of ten poems by the same poet.

Applicants must only submit one entry in any one category. Translations submitted must not have been published in any form prior to the deadline set for submissions.

Entries for The Korea Times Awards must not have been submitted for any other translation contest in the same year.

Deadline for submissions : Sept. 1, 2010

To go to the website link, click HERE.

Poets & Writers, Inc., the USA’s largest nonprofit organization serving creative writers, celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. As part of its celebrations, Poets & Writers presents ‘Connecting Cultures’, the magazine’s inaugural cross-cultural reading on Monday 1 March, 2010 6.30-8.30 pm, Cave Canem Foundation, 20 Jay Street, Suite 310-A, Brooklyn, New York. 

If you are in New York at the beginning of March, hear the work of the following writers and other special guests, all of whom have participated in P&W-supported readings and workshops. (Among those listed there is only one writer from the Asia-Pacific region: Jakarta-born, Boston-raised Anonius Wiriadjaja.): NeNe Ali; Heather Archibald; Renee Michele Breeden; Margaret Cox; Jonathan Betts Fields; Robert Gibbons; Beatriz Gil; Juliet P. Howard; Tsaurah Litzky; Kyla Marshell; Jessica Maldonado; Viviann Rodriguez; J.F. Seary; Margarita Soto; Rhina Valentin; and Antonius Wiriadjaja.

ALSO Poets & Writers’ 2010 ‘Writers for Writers’ awards will be presented at Poets & Writers’ 40th anniversary benefit dinner, ‘In Celebration of Writers’, on March 18, 2010, at Capitale in New York City. 

Poets & Writers established the Writers for Writers Award in 1996 to recognize authors who have given generously to other writers or to the broader literary community. The title of the award has been given to Barnes & Noble in appreciation of their sponsorship of Poets & Writers. Last year, Poets & Writers began presenting the Editor’s Award, recognizing a book editor who has made an outstanding contribution to the publication of poetry or literary prose over a sustained period of time.           

 Junot Díaz, Maxine Hong Kingston, and M. L. Liebler are the recipients of the 2010 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award. Pat Strachan receives the Editor’s Award. 

Junot Díaz is the co-founder of the VONA Voices Workshop, which is dedicated to nurturing developing writers of colour. He is the winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead, 2007), which was named “Novel of the Decade” by New York Magazine.  His fiction has been published in The New Yorker and The Paris Review, and four times in The Best American Short Stories. His bestselling debut book, Drown (Riverhead, 1996), led to his inclusion among Newsweek’s “New Faces of 1996.” The New Yorker placed him on a list of the twenty top writers for the twenty-first century. Born in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic, and raised there and in New Jersey, Díaz graduated from Rutgers and received an MFA from Cornell. He lives in New York City and Boston, and is a tenured professor at MIT. 

Maxine Hong Kingston has led writing and meditation workshops for veterans and their families for fifteen years. She is Senior Lecturer for Creative Writing at the University of California, Berkeley. Her memoirs and fiction include: The Fifth Book of Peace (Knopf, 2003), Hawai’i One Summer (University of Hawaii Press, 1998), Tripmaster Monkey (Knopf, 1989), China Men (Knopf, 1980), and The Woman Warrior (Random House, 1976). She has received the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the PEN West Award for Fiction, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and a National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Maxine Hong Kingston has led writing and meditation workshops for veterans and their families for fifteen years. She is Senior Lecturer for Creative Writing at the University of California, Berkeley. Her memoirs and fiction include: The Fifth Book of Peace (Knopf, 2003), Hawai’i One Summer (University of Hawaii Press, 1998), Tripmaster Monkey (Knopf, 1989), China Men (Knopf, 1980), and The Woman Warrior (Random House, 1976). She has received the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the PEN West Award for Fiction, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and a National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

M. L. Liebler is an internationally-known Detroit poet, university professor, literary arts activist, and arts organizer. He is the author of 13 books, including Wide Awake in Someone Else’s Dream (Wayne State University Press, 2008), which received both the Paterson Poetry Prize for Literary Excellence and the American Indie Book Award for 2009. In addition to his many books, Liebler has read, performed and taught poetry all around the world on behalf of the U.S. State Department. He has taught at Wayne State University in Detroit since 1980, and he is the founding director of both The National Writer’s Voice Project in Detroit and the Springfed Arts: Metro Detroit Writers Literary Arts Organization.  He was recently selected as Best Detroit Poet by The Detroit Free Press and Detroit’s Metro Times, and he was the nation’s first artist-in-residence for a public library at the Chelsea District Library for 2008-2009.  

Pat Strachan has been a senior editor at Little, Brown since 2002. She began her career at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where she worked as an editor for seventeen years, rising to vice president and associate publisher. After four years as a fiction editor at The New Yorker, she returned to book publishing. 

The chair of this year’s awards is John Makinson, Chairman and Chief Executive of The Penguin Group.  New York Times-bestselling author and humorist Dave Barry will be master of ceremonies on the night. Galen Williams, the founder of Poets & Writers, will also be honored at the event.      

Enter the 2010 Commonwealth Short Story Competition
First prize of £2,000
Special and Regional prizes of £500

DEADLINE 31 March 2010

Click here for online entry form

The Commonwealth Short Story Competition is an annual scheme to promote new creative writing, funded and administered by the Commonwealth Foundation and the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association.  Each year around 25 winning and highly commended stories from the different regions of the Commonwealth are recorded on to CDs and broadcast on radio stations across the Commonwealth.
 
Anyone aged 19 or over who is a citizen of a Commonwealth country can enter. There are total of 53 countries within the Commonwealth. In the Asia-Pacific region, these are Australia, Brunei Darussalam, India, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritius, New Zealand, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Seychelles, and Singapore.

Stories should be original, unpublished, written in English and no more than 600 words. There is no entry fee.

Disclaimer: The Asia-Pacific Writing Partnership acknowledges objections to the notion of the ‘Commonwealth’ on the grounds that it is an archaic concept left-over from British colonialism. We post this notice because the Commonwealth Foundation’s writing prizes can recognise and give wide exposure to writers in our region while there are still few literary prizes recognising writers from Asia and the Pacific, except in Australia,  New Zealand and the Philippines.

Other international awards are the Man Asian Literary Prize run out of Hong Kong, the Kiriyama Prize run out of California (but this is currently ‘restricted’ (postponed?) , and Thailand’s S.E.A. WRITE awards (see our PRIZES links to these.) The short-lived Australia-Asian Literary Prize awarded by the West Australian government has been scrapped.

We would be pleased to hear of any other major international literary prizes open to writers in the region.

The winners of the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for a work of fiction published within the Commonwealth within the past year will be announced in New Delhi on 12 April, 2010.

The Commonwealth Prize aims to promote new voices, reward achievement, and encourage readership and literacy from the 53 countries of the Commonwealth. In the Asia-Pacific region Commonwealth countries are Australia, Brunei Darussalam, India, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritius, New Zealand, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Seychelles, and Singapore.

The Director of the Commonwealth Foundation, Mark Collins, said: “The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize is distinct and unique in that the books that win often have strong insight, spirit and voice about the incredible diversity, history and society of the Commonwealth. The Prize aims to reward the best of Commonwealth fiction written in English and in doing so, spots rising talent and creates new literary figures from the Commonwealth. This is the Prize to watch for tomorrow’s best-sellers.”

The prize is presented by the Commonwealth Foundation with support from the Macquarie Group Foundation, one of Australia’s leading philanthropic foundations.  

This year the prize will be judged and awarded in New Delhi, organized by Indian literary agency and dynamic literary events programming organisation Siyahi.

The program, which runs 7-12 April, will bring together the finalists from the different regions of the Commonwealth. The two winners will be announced there on 12 April.  (See Commonwealth Foundation news)

Last year’s winners of the overall Commonwealth Writers’ Prize were The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas (Best Book) and A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif (Best First Book

The shortlisted writers for South Asia and Europe Best Book are:

• Solo by Rana Dasgupta (Britain)
• For Pepper and Christ: A Novel by Keki Daruwalla (India)
• The Beijing of Possibilities by Jonathan Tel (Britain)
• Heartland by Anthony Catwright (Britain)
• Another Gulmohar Tree by Aamer Hussein (Pakistan)
• The Immortals by Amit Chaudhuri (India)

The shortlisted writers for South Asia and Europe Best First Book are:

• The Hungry Ghosts by Anne Berry (Britain)
• Arzee the Dwarf by Chandrahas Choudhury (India)
• In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Pakistan)
• Among Thieves by Mez Packer (Britain)
• An Equal Stillness by Francesca Kay (Britain)
• Tail of the Blue Bird by Nii Parkes (Britain

The shortlisted writers for South East Asia and Pacific Best Book are:

• Summertime by J.M Coetzee (Australia)
• A Good Land by Nada Awar Jarrar (Australia)
• The Adventures of Vela by Albert Wendt (Samoa)
• Singularity by Charlotte Grimshaw (New Zealand)
• The People’s Train by Thomas Keneally (Australia)
• Parrot and Oliver in America by Peter Carey (Australia)

The shortlisted writers for South East Asia and Pacific Best First Book are:

• The Ice Age by Kirsten Reed (Australia)
• After the fire, a still small voice by Evie Wyld (Australia)
• Look Who’s Morphing by Tom Cho (Australia)
• Document Z by Andrew Croome (Australia)
• Come Inside by Glenys Osborne (Australia)
• Siddon Rock by Glenda Guest (Australia)

The ‘Vision’ of the Commonwealth Foundation is: “Commonwealth civil society contributing to national and international goals for democracy, sustainable development and cultural diversity for the benefit of all people.”

Mountain Echoes is a three-day literary festival in Thimphu, Bhutan. It will focus on ‘the magic and mystique of writings from and about the Himalayan regions’.

The festival was conceptualised by Pavan K. Varma, Indian Ambassador to Bhutan. Program consultant and advisor Namita Gokhale is an Indian novelist and publisher who helped organise the first ever International Festival of Indian Literature, Neemrana 2002, and the Africa Asia Writers’ Conference, Neemrana 2006.  She also helped design and programme the Jaipur Literature Festival and is the Founder Director for Translating Bharat.

Mountain Echoes will bring some international authors, poets and performers together at the colourful and vibrant land of the lamas. It will be a major step taken to create an interface between the cultural relationship shared by India and Bhutan.

The air and atmosphere of Bhutan helps creating a mood of liveliness, joie de vivre and a cherishing of moments where stories are told, poems and song are sung.

• The programme will focus on unique stories from the mountains with writers from different tracts of the Trans-Himalayan belt, sharing their ideas and literary traditions.
   
• Mountain Echoes will provide a platform for authors from India and Bhutan to get together and engage in a cultural dialogue and understand the Indian and Bhutanese literature in all its myriad forms and dimensions.
   

For programme and speakers click HERE .

Thimphu, Bhutan

Australia’s most anticipated and influential literary festival is back, celebrating writers from here and beyond, home and away. Adelaide Writers’ Week has long been acknowledged for the quality and diversity of its speakers, writers encountered in the shade of tents and plane trees where an amiable late-summer mood prevails. Here readers can mingle with some of the world’s most distinguished literary figures in a meeting place between a memorial garden for women and a colonial parade ground, on Kaurna country.

In 2010 Adelaide Writers’ Week will build on traditions that have evolved over four decades, bringing together writers and readers in a series of stimulating readings, debates and exchanges. Old friends, writers known and respected, will be there alongside new writers with new writing. The popular mix of panel discussions, ‘Meet the Author’ sessions, lectures and readings will be included.

Writers’ Week is part of the Adelaide Festival of Arts.

Click HERE for the programme (PDF)

• Booktalks
• Panel discussions
• Writing workshops
• Readings
• Intimate discussions
• Meet-the-author events

This year’s programme will also include elements of cabaret, theatre, spoken word and performances in venues as diverse and inclusive as possible. For more information, see the website HERE.

Keep an eye on Italian publishing house Metropoli d’Asia for its potential to take new writing from Asia to Europe.  See it’s current list of authors by clicking here .

 Some of Metropoli d’Asia’s authors will appear at Italian literary festivals – the Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino (13-17 May, 2010) and the Venice international festival of literature ‘Incroci di Civiltà’.

 The festival in Venice celebrates writing in a city that has cultivated the notion of itself as ‘a crossroads between East and West’. Since 2008, the Venice festival guests have included writers Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, Zhang Jie, Anita Desai and Kiran Desai. This year guests will include Zhu Wen, author of Dollari la mia passione (I Love Dollars). 

India is the celebrated nation at the 2010 Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino. The guests will include Anita Desai, Anita Nair, Vikas Swarup, Namita Devidayal, Tishani Doshi Prem Shankar Jha; Radhika Jha, Sudhir Kakar, Kiran Nagarkar, Indra Sinha, Tarun Tejpal, Altaf Tyrewala as well as Western writers who, like Australian writer Gregory David Roberts, author of a cult novel set in Bombay, Shantaram, have given memorable depictions of India.

A recent visit by Metrolopi d’Asia’s Andrea Berrini to Korea with UK literary agent Toby Eady suggests plans for Italian translations of Korean literature. Metrolopli d’Asia has announced joint ventures with publishers in Singapore and Indonesia.

‘Strange Bedfellows or Perfect Partners: The role of literary studies in creative writing programs’

Asia-Pacific Writing Partnership’s next event (following our Hong Kong symposium in March 2010) will be an Asia-Pacific focused panel organised by the Partnership’s Board member Professor Catherine Cole as part of a conference entitled ‘Strange Bedfellows or Perfect Partners: The role of literary studies in creative writing programs’  held at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), in Melbourne, Australia, 25-27 November 2010.

‘Strange Bedfellows’ is the 2010 conference for the Australian Association of Writing Programs. Click to download Call for Papers PDF.

Inquiries about the conference should be directed to Professor Catherine Cole (Catherine.Cole@RMIT.edu.au) with ‘2010 AAWP’ in the email’s subject line.

This is an opportunity for literary studies scholars to meet teachers and students of creative writing and to discuss some of the issues involved in teaching creative writing in Asia.