Courtesy: Matt Todd, A Novel Approach
Lisa of ANZLitLovers has hit the ground running with two reviews this week – and she says that already she is going to find it hard to choose between the two. That augurs well (or badly, depending on your point of view!) for our judging, doesn’t it?
Anyhow, here are links to Lisa’s reviews:
Have you read either of these books?
Locator Map of South Korea (Courtesy: Seb az86556, using CC-BY-3.0, via Wikipedia)
Two of the Man Asian Literary Prize team have cheated! They read and reviewed Please Look After Mother by Kyung-Sook Shin before our team was formed, and are showing me up big-time. I bear no grudge though and happily point you to their reviews. We are, as they say, on our way!
Shin Kyung-sook was born in South Korea in 1963. She has written several novels though few have been translated into English – and has won major literary awards in her country.
It’s exciting, in fact, that our first reviews represent a country – South Korea – that many of us (speaking for myself at least) are not well read in. This diversity – with books from such places as Iran, South Korea, and Bangladesh as well as from the bigger countries like China, India and Japan – has to be one of the best things about the Man Asian Literary Prize.
PS Apologies for the unusual rapid fire of posts this week. I promise I won’t keep filling up your inboxes/readers/feeds like this – I couldn’t keep it up anyhow!
Image created by Matt of A Novel Approach
This week, to whet your appetite (unbeknownst to you!), I focused my Monday Musings on Asian Australian writers … What, do you say, was I whetting your appetite for? Well, for a plan to review the longlist for this year’s Man Asian Literary Prize, which is an annual literary award given to the best novel* by an Asian writer published in the previous calendar year. The plan involves a team – conceived by Lisa and Matt (see below) – of bloggers who will review, between them, all the longlisted titles.
The longlisted books are:
Our Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011 blogging team consists of
Each blogger will post her/his own review/s and will also post links to reviews on team members’ blogs.
After the announcement of the shortlist next January and before the winner is announced in March, we will, if possible, select a shadow winner. Watch this space (well, not THIS ACTUAL SPOT) for updates.
Thanks to Kevin from Canada whose Shadow Giller Prize Jury inspired our plan. And again, thanks to Lisa for getting our ball rolling and to Matt for creating our logo. We hope our readers enjoy this coordinated approach to providing reviews …
* The novel can be either written in English or translated to English.
Whispering Gums 