Man Asia Literary Prize Longlist

Tragic is playing a bit of catch-up on announcements from the latter part 2010 and missed a prize that is growing in stature, the Man Asian Literary Prize which announced it's longlist in December.

The prize was founded in 2007 and is an annual literary award given to the best novel by an Asian writer, either written in English or translated into English, and published in the previous calendar year. The judges choose a longlist of 10 to 15 titles announced in December, followed by a shortlist of 5 to 6 titles announced in February, and a winner is awarded in March. The winning author is awarded USD 30,000 and the translator (if any) USD 5,000. Submissions are invited through publishers based in any country.

Writers from Japan, China, India and the Philippinesh ave made the longlist for the 2010. Thelist includes Japanese writer, Kenzaburo Oe, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994.

A pretty impressive line-up of judges this year including Monica Ali whose own book, Brick Lane, is on Tragic's bed side reading pile as he writes. Judges profile below, courtesy of the slightly grungy (for such a well established brand), Man Asia Literary Prize site.

Those currently available in the US linked below.

2010 Longlist 

Three Sisters by Bi Feiyu

Way to Go by Upamanyu Chatterjee

Dahanu Road by Anosh Irani

Serious Men by Manu Joseph

The Thing About Thugs by Tabish Khair

Tiger Hills by Sarita Mandanna

The Changeling by Kenzaburo Oe

Hotel Iris by Yoko Ogawa

Monkey-man by Usha K.R.

Below the Crying Mountain by Criselda Yabes

Monica Ali is the daughter of English and Bangladeshi parents. Coming to England aged three, she grew up in Bolton in Greater Manchester, and later studied at Oxford University. Her debut novel, Brick Lane (2003), an epic saga about a Bangladeshi family living in the UK, explores the British immigrant experience. It was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and made into a major motion picture, released in 2007. Her collection of stories set in and around a Portuguese village, Alentejo Blue, was published in 2006. Her latest novel, In the Kitchen (2009), returns to London and issues of multiculturalism, identity and belonging. Ali has been named by Granta magazine as one of the twenty best young British novelists. She lives with her husband and two children in London.

Homi K. Bhabha is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English at Harvard University and Harvard’s Director of the Humanities Center. He is the author of numerous works exploring, among other themes, colonial and postcolonial theory, cultural change and power, and cosmopolitanism. Some of his works include Nation and Narration and The Location of Culture, which has been translated into Korean, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Serbian, German and Portuguese. A Global Measure is forthcoming with Harvard University Press, The Right to Narrate with Columbia University Press. Most recently, Bhabha has been involved in the contemporary Asian art scene, as advisor at key art institutions including the Institute of Contemporary Arts London, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Rockefeller Foundation, as member of the Asian Art Council at the Guggenheim Museum New York and as consultant at the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives project at the Museum of Modern Art New York. Educated at the University of Bombay and the University of Oxford, Bhabha was profiled by Newsweek as one of “100 Americans for the Next [21st] Century.” 

Hsu-Ming Teo is a cultural historian and novelist. Born in Malaysia, her family migrated to Sydney, Australia in 1977. Her first novel Love and Vertigo (1999) won The Australian/ Vogel Literary Award and was also short-listed for the inaugural Tasmania Pacific Region Literary Prize and the Dobbie Award for women’s fiction. Her second novel, Behind the Moon (2005) was short-listed for one of the 2006 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. She was a member of the NSW Premier’s Literature and History committee in 2004 and one of the judges of the 2007 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. She has been on the Advisory Council of the Man Asian Literary Prize since 2007. Teo is a Lecturer at Macquarie University, where her research and teaching interests are in the area of twentieth-century European history, British imperial culture, travel and tourism, and popular literature.