The search for the first winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize began in earnest on Friday with the announcement in Hong Kong of the 23 authors whose works have been selected for the longlist.
The award, sponsored by Man Group, the backer of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and Hong Kong's International Literary Festival, attracted more than 240 entries from countries including India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan, Myanmar, Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, China, Macau, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea and Japan.
'This first year's submissions exceeded our expectations both in quality and breadth,' says prize chairman Peter Gordon. 'We're very pleased at the reception this inaugural prize has received throughout the region and to see submissions from almost every country in Asia.'
Many of the submissions (manuscripts of completed novels not yet published in English) came late in the day, says Gordon. 'We were beginning to wonder how many we would receive. The authors seem to have been polishing their works right up until the last minute. ' The longlist includes Chinese writer Mo Yan, best known for Red Sorghum in the late 1980s, which depicts the hidden desires and grief experienced by farmers during and after the second world war and was adapted for an award-winning film by director Zhang Yimou.
Mo was tipped by critics as a Nobel laureate in waiting after the release of Big Breasts and Wide Hips (1995). His shortlisted novel, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, borrows from the Buddhist theory of reincarnation to trace the history of the rural mainland under communist rule from 1950 to 2000.
Fellow Chinese writers whose works will go forward to the next stage of judging include Guo Xiaolu, whose A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers this year won critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, and Jiang Rong, whose Wolf Totem has sold more than a million copies on the mainland and was snapped up for translation by Penguin in 2005 for US$100,000. It will be released in English in March.
Other voices from around the region include Filipino author Jose Dalisay Jnr, who has written 15 books of stories, plays, and essays, five of which received the National Book Award from the Manila Critics Circle, and Hong Kong's Xu Xi, named by The New York Times as a pioneer writer from Asia in English.
