In late October last year, twelve books from across Asia were longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, and in January, they were whittled down to an unusually long shortlist of seven. Today, one emerged the winner: And woo hoo! It’s our Shadow team’s pick, Kyung-sook Shin’s Please look after mom (or mother).
Now, I’ll have to wait to see what the judges say about their choice, but there you have it!
Image by Matt Todd of A Novel Approach
In the meantime, below is just a little info about the judges … and, in particular, about the chair, Razia Iqbal.
Judges
The judges for the 2011 prize were Razia Iqbal (Chair), BBC Special Correspondent; Chang-rae Lee, Pulitzer-prize finalist & author of The Surrendered; and Vikas Swarup author of Q&A, the movie adaptation Slumdog Millionaire.
Iqbal said recently that her criteria for judging were:
the quality of the reading experience; that you feel that the book coheres, that the structure of the novel was coherent.
The books she liked most when growing up were, she said, those with links to the Asian continent, such as books by Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi who
wrote about what it meant to be Asian in a globalised world, what it meant to come from a multi-cultural city like London, which I could relate to. Their writing incorporated elements of polyphony and hybridity which were part of my own experience, whilst people like James Baldwin and Richard Wright reflected what it was to be an outsider. Literature allows you to navigate your place in the world in a profound way for a lot of people.
For reviews of all books by our Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize team, see my Man Asian Literary Prize page.
