The Script Road

For more information, click HERE.

Conversations Across Borders

Paired writers decide between themselves whether to respond to the prompt with a single piece or with individual pieces that speak in conversation with one another. There are no minimum or maximum length guidelines.

Completed work is hosted on the Conversations Across Borders website.  Each participant is asked to write a narrative describing the social and creative process he or she went through.

Conversations Across Borders is doing four separate writing prompts this year. After each prompt, they will  ask participants to partner with a new writer.

The prompts:  

Winter (Jan 1-March 31): Water

Spring (April 1-June 30): Air

Summer (July 1-Sept 30): Fire

Fall (Oct. 1-Dec. 31): Earth

To apply to take part in this initiative, click HERE.

The academic journal Asiatic (http://asiatic.iium.edu.my/), based at the International Islamic University Malaysia, is calling for papers for three special issues.

Fakrul Alam, Professor of English at the University of Dhaka will guest edit an issue in June on ‘Expatriation, Immigration and Return in Recent South Asian Fiction’. The journal also invites author interviews, review articles and book reviews relevant to the issue. The deadline for submissions for the June issue is April 30, 2012.  Send articles to Professor Alam at falam57@gmail.com.

The September special issue will be themed around ‘The Poetry and Poetics of Popular Culture in the Asia-Pacific Region’. For this issue, Asiatic invites papers on poetry and poetics and their relations and connections to popular culture in all its forms in the context of Asia-Pacific/Australasian region, keeping in mind that poetry’s presence and influence can be found in all forms of pop culture and everyday life. Self-reflective papers based on poets’ own poetry are welcome. Papers must be submitted for peer-review by April 30, 2012. For more information about the issue, see the journal’s submission guidelines or contact Mohammad A Quayum (mquayum@gamil.com).

 (http://asiatic.iium.edu.my/submission.htm)

The special December issue is themed ‘Nature and Culture: The Asian Landscape’ and will focus on how we perceive and interact with the land around us varies from place to place and people to people. The deadline for submission is 1 August 2012 and you can email queries, abstracts and articles to the guest editors of the issue: Dr. Sim Wai Chew, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (wcsim@usa.net) or Dr. Paoi Hwang, Durham, UK (paoi.hwang@gmail.com).

Manu Joseph & Tarun Tejpal at the 2011 festival

DSC Jaipur Literature Festival is the largest literary festival in Asia-Pacific, and India’s most prestigious celebration of national and international literature. It includes readings, talks, debates, performances, children’s workshops and interactive activities held in the beautiful heritage property, Diggi Palace in the Rajasthani capital of Jaipur.

Entering its fifth year, JLF draws writers and readers from across India and the world. ‘The brightest, most brilliant, funny, moving  and remarkable authors come to Jaipur every January’.

The Festival is free and open to all. For information click HERE to go straight to the festival website.

The  Programme for the HSBC Galle Literary Festival 2012 can be found HERE.

The festival promises lively sessions with diverse writers from around the world, including  Aminatta Forna, Romesh Gunesekera, Nayantara Sahgal, Shashi Tharoor, Joanne Trollope, Richard Dawkins, Tom Stoppard, D.B.C Pierre, Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish and John Boyne.

The banking group HSBC is now the festival’s name sponsor.  Tickets will be on sale in early January 2012.

For information about this three-week residency, click HERE.

Previous T.K. Wong Fellows

Call for submissions for the 2012 David T.K. Wong Fellowship – deadline 16 JANUARY 2012.

The David T. K. Wong Fellowship is a unique and generous annual award of £26,000 to enable a fiction writer who wants to write in English about a serious aspect of the Far East to spend a year in the UK, at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. The Fellowship is named for its sponsor Mr. David T. K. Wong, a retired Hong Kong businessman, who has also been a teacher, journalist and senior civil servant, and is a writer of short stories himself. The Fellowship was launched in 1997 and the first Fellow appointed from 1st October 1998.

Applicants can be of any age or nationality, and will need to submit an original, previously unpublished script of 2,500 words before the 16^th January 2012. The fellowship will begin on 1^st October 2012 . For full details on how to apply, and to find all relevant application forms, please visit http://www.uea.ac.uk/lit/fellowships/david-wong-fellowship

Seven novels have been shortlisted for the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize, among the authors at least two who are already internationally well-known.

Chair of the judging panel, Razia Iqbal, commented on the strength of contemporary fiction coming out of Asia. ‘The judges were greatly impressed by the imaginative power of the stories now being written about rapidly changing life in worlds as diverse as the arid borderlands of Pakistan, the crowded cityscape of modern Seoul, and the opium factories of nineteenth century Canton,’ she said.

The two other judges for this year’s Prize are Pulitzer-prize finalist and author of The Surrendered, Chang-rae Lee, and Vikas Swarup, author of Q&A which was filmed as the movie Slumdog Millionaire.

Ninety books were submitted for entry in 2011. Four of the shortlisted novels were originally written in English; the novels from South Korea, China and Japan are all judged in translation. Some were collections of linked short stories.

The Man Asian Literary Prize, started in 2007, is just one of several literary prizes for writers in Asia. The Man Asian prize links itself to the prestigious Booker Prize because it shares the same sponsor. Man has sponsored the Booker Prize since 2005 although the Booker has been running for more than 40 years.  It also sponsors the Man Booker International and the Lost Man Booker Prize.

For writers in South East Asia, the S.E.A. Write Awards are considered prestigious, but are almost unknown in Western literary circles.

For writers in South Asia, the new DSC Prize for South Asian Literature should be at least as prestigious, awarded to writers of any ethnicity or nationality writing about South Asia. That prize, sponsored by the Indian infrastructure and construction company DSC Limited, also carries generous financial rewards.

In the Philippines, the Palanca Awards or Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature is the most prestigious and most enduring literary award, dubbed Philippines Pulitzer.

China’s two top literary awards are the Lu Xun and the Lao She.

The Man Asian Literary Prize as conceptualised by the writer Nury Vittachi, and as still described on the Man Group Plc’s website, was originally intended for an Asian novel unpublished in English. The objectives were ‘to bring exciting new Asian authors to the attention of the world literary community; to facilitate publishing and translation of Asian literature in and into English; and to highlight Asia’s developing role in world literature, in particularly the UK, Australia, India and Canada.’

Several of the authors who made the short list of this year’s Prize, Amitav Ghosh and Banana Yoshimoto among them, are already well known in the West and are hardly ‘exciting new discoveries’ for Western readers.

The short list was announced in London, not in Hong Kong, the home of the Prize. The winner of the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize will be announced 15 March, 2012, in Hong Kong.

The shortlisted authors and books are:

Jamil Ahmad (Pakistan) – The Wandering Falcon (Penguin India/Hamish Hamilton)

Jahnavi Barua (India) – Rebirth (Penguin India/Penguin Books)

Rahul Bhattacharya (India) - The Sly Company of People Who Care (Pan Macmillan/Pan Macmillan India/Picador)

Amitav Ghosh (India) – River of Smoke (John Murray/Penguin India/Hamish Hamilton)

Kyung-Sook Shin (South Korea) – Please Look After Mom (Alfred A. Knopf)

Yan Lianke (China) – Dream of Ding Village (Grove Atlantic)

Banana Yoshimoto (Japan) - Banana Yoshimoto (Melville House)

ABOUT THE AUTHORS AND THEIR BOOKS

Jamil Ahmad was born in Jalandhar in 1933. As a member of the Civil Service of Pakistan, he served mainly in the Frontier Province and in Balochistan. He was Political Agent in Quetta, Chaghi, Khyber and Malakand. Later, he was commissioner in Dera Ismail Khan and in Swat. He was also chairman of the Tribal Development Corporation. He was posted as minister in Pakistan’s embassy in Kabul at a critical time, before and during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. He now lives in Islamabad. The Wandering Falcon is his first novel.

About the book:  Set in the decades before the rise of the Taliban, Jamil Ahmad’s stunning debut takes us to the essence of human life in the forbidden areas where the borders of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan meet. Today the ‘tribal areas’ are often spoken about as a remote region, a hotbed of conspiracies, drone attacks and conflict. In The Wandering Falcon, this highly traditional, honour-bound culture is revealed from the inside for the first time.

WHAT THE JUDGES SAID: “A stark and loosely connected set of stories set on the frontiers of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan, which seem timeless and absorbing; this has the feel of a captivating classic.”

Jahnavi Barua is based in Bangalore. She is a medical doctor but has been writing fiction for the past seven years. Her first book, Next Door, a collection of short stories, was published by Penguin India in 2008 to wide critical acclaim. Barua’s short fiction has been widely anthologized and she also contributes essays and book reviews to various publications. In 2006, the British Council awarded her a Charles Wallace Trust fellowship for Creative Writing.

About the book: Rebirth is the story of Kaberi, a young woman coming to grips with an uncertain marriage. It is also an intimate portrait of the passionate bond between a mother and her unborn child. Moving between Bangalore and Guwahati the novel weaves together Kaberi’s inner and outer worlds as she negotiates the treacherous waters of betrayal and loss.

WHAT THE JUDGES SAID: “This is highly controlled, finely restrained writing. What appears to be a straightforward portrait of an uncertain marriage reveals itself layer after layer to be a more poignant tale of the redemptive power of love, but also of the power of story telling to make yourself anew.”

Rahul Bhattacharya – was born in 1979. A cricket journalist since 2000, he is now a contributing editor with Wisden Asia Cricket and has been writing for the Wisden Almanack since 2003, when he compiled the series overview of India in England, 2002. He also writes for the Guardian.

About the book: A 26-year-old Indian journalist decides to give up his job and travel to a country where he can escape the deadness of his life’. So he arrives in Guyana, a forgotten colonial society of raw, mesmerising beauty. From the beautiful, decaying wooden houses of Georgetown, through coastal sugarcane plantations, to the dark rainforest interior scavenged by diamond-hunters, he is absorbed by the fantastic possibilities of this place where the descendants of the enslaved and the indentured have made a new world.

WHAT THE JUDGES SAID: “Part travelogue, part novel, this is both funny and smart: a young Indian cricket journalist travels to Guyana, and finds it and its people beguiling. Bhattacharya’s prose style is reminiscent of early Naipaul, and his engagement with his subject is full of humanity.”

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956 and grew up in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and India. He is the author of several novels including the bestselling Sea of Poppies which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008. He currently divides his time between Calcutta, Goa and Brooklyn.

About the book: In September 1838 a storm blows up on the Indian Ocean and the Ibis, a ship carrying a consignment of convicts and indentured laborers from Calcutta to Mauritius, is caught up in the whirlwind. On the grand scale of an historical epic, River of Smoke follows its storm-tossed characters to the crowded harbors of China. There, despite efforts of the emperor to stop them, ships from Europe and India exchange their cargoes of opium for boxes of tea, silk, porcelain and silver. Following Sea of Poppies, this is the second novel in Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy.

WHAT THE JUDGES SAID: “This is epic story telling, set against the backdrop of the Opium wars, meticulously researched and important. It not only presents a strong case for hybridity, but also a reminder of an earlier time when the East was ascendant.”

Kyung-sook Shin is the author of numerous works of fiction and is one of South Korea’s most widely read and acclaimed novelists. She has been honored with the Manhae Literature Prize, the Dong-in Literature Prize, and the Yi Sang Literary Prize, as well as France’s Prix de l’Inaperçu. Please Look After Mom is her first book to appear in English and will be published in 29 countries. Currently a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York City, she lives in Seoul.

About the book: A million-plus-copy best seller in Korea, Please Look After Mom is the stunning, deeply moving story of a family’s search for their mother, who goes missing one afternoon amid the crowds of the Seoul Station subway.

WHAT THE JUDGES SAID: “This is a moving and structurally compelling novel, which examines a single family’s history through the story of the matriarch, who mysteriously goes missing from a train station. A disquieting portrait of what can happen when ancient rituals and tradition are ignored in favour of modernity.”

Yan Lianke was born in 1958 in Henan Province, China. He is the author of many novels and short story collection, including Serve the People!, and has won China’s two top literary awards, the Lu Xun for Nian, yue, ri (The Year, the Month, the Day), and the Lao She for Shouhuo (Pleasure).

About the book: Officially censored upon its Chinese publication, Dream of Ding Village is Chinese novelist Yan Lianke’s most important novel to date. Set in a poor village in Henan province, it is a deeply moving and beautifully written account of a blood-selling scandal in contemporary China.

WHAT THE JUDGES SAID: “An impressive and searing work, which chronicles the disturbing practice of blood selling using dirty needles in rural China, which results in peasants becoming infected with the AIDS virus; both true story and allegory on the price a country can pay in the pursuit of power, money and real estate.”

Banana Yoshimoto  wrote her first novel, Kitchen, while working as a waitress at a golf-course restaurant. It sold millions of copies worldwide, and led to a phenomenon dubbed by Western journalists as “Banana-mania.” Yoshimoto has gone on to be one of the biggest-selling and most distinguished writers in Japanese history, winning numerous awards for her work. The Lake is her thirteenth book of fiction.

About the book: This novel tells the tale of a young woman who moves to Tokyo after the death of her mother, hoping to get over her grief and start a career as a graphic artist. She finds herself spending too much time staring out her window, though … until she realizes she’s gotten used to seeing a young man across the street staring out his window, too. They eventually embark on a hesitant romance, until she learns that he has been the victim of some form of childhood trauma. Visiting two of his friends who live a monastic life beside a beautiful lake, she begins to piece together a series of clues that lead her to suspect his experience may have had something to do with a bizarre religious cult.

WHAT THE JUDGES SAID: “Both poetic and atmospheric, The Lake is a moving glimpse into the nature of an unconventional relationship; the couple who have a troubled past seek solace and solitude by a lake in the country, where dark secrets are unearthed.”