A rojak* of items that caught my
eye this week…
Titles from Asia on the Man
Booker International Prize 2016 longlist
The Man Booker International Prize has announced 13 novels in contention for
the 2016 Prize, which aims to celebrate the finest in global fiction. View the
full list here. Asian writers who made
the cut are: from South Korea, Han Kang, for The Vegetarian; Japanese Nobel winner Kenzaburō Ōe, for Death by Water, his 16th book translated
to English; from Indonesia Eka Kurniawan for Man Tiger; and from China Yan Lianke for The Four Books, a title that took him 20 years to plan, two to
write and which was rejected by 20 publishers for its political content before
being banned in mainland China.
Quick Notice
Human Acts by Han Kang, translated
by Deborah Smith
About the book: Following on from
the success of The Vegetarian, a
second novel from Han Kang has just been released in English. In Human Acts Han Kang points her
penetrating literary talents to the violent suppression of the 1980 student
uprisings in Gwangju, and the unending personal and political effect it had on
South Korea. The novel opens with a boy who while searching for his missing
friend gets roped into helping other mourners find their missing relatives,
and with a soul watching his own body being cleared from the square with so
many others. It then follows an editor,
a prisoner and a factory worker as they drift through the decades trying to
make sense of their lives under censorship, repression and their own terrible
memories. Already a controversial bestseller and award-winner in South Korea,
it confirms to the English-speaking world that Han Kang is a writer of immense importance.
About the author: Han Kang was
born in Gwangju and moved to Seoul at the age of ten. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei
University. She currently teaches
creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. Her novels have been translated into 16
languages and she has won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today’s Young Artist
Award and the Korean Literature Novel Award.
Human Acts won the Manhae
Literary Award.
About the translator: Deborah
Smith’s translations from Korean include The
Vegetarian, and also Bae Suah’s The Essayist’s
Desk. She is the founder of Titled Axis Press, a UK-based publishing house publishing
titles in translation from Asia and Africa.
See the weekly Twitter spot for her Twitter account.
Details: Human Acts is published as
an eBook and in paperback by Portobello Books, priced in local currencies.
Quick notice
Hong Kong Fiascos: A Struggle for
Survival by David T. K. Wong
About the book: Hong Kong Fiascos is the second in a planned
autobiographical quartet. The first instalment, Adrift: My Childhood in Colonial Singapore traced David’s childhood from his birth in Hong Kong, to his
early years in Canton, to his later childhood in Singapore - living with the
complicated extended families of his polygamous grandfather and father - to his
turbulent adolescence in Perth, where he’d gone to escape the Japanese Occupation. Hong Kong Fiascos sees David return to British Hong Kong where he
struggles with establishing his career, and the moral conflicts of being a
civil servant sandwiched between duty to the people and to the occupiers. On the personal front he embarks on marriage
and starts a family.
About the author: David T.K. Wong
worked as a journalist in Hong Kong, London and Singapore before joining the
Administrative Service of the Hong Kong Government. He has published four
collections of well-received short stories and two novels. He now lives in
Malaysia, and is the founder of the annual David T. K. Wong Fellowship in
Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in the UK. The Fellowship
awards GBP26,000 to a successful candidate to write a serious work of fiction
set in the Far East.
Details: Hong Kong Fiascos is
published by Epigram Books, Singapore, in paperback, priced at SGD27.90
Twitter spot
Each week I make a suggestion of
an interesting Twitter account you may like to follow. This week’s selection is Deborah Smith’s
account. As already mentioned she is Han
Kang’s translator, and the founder of Titled Axis Press, which focusses on publishing
titles from Asia in translation. She
tweets as @londonkoreanist.
