Asia House Literature Festival: Following Along From Asia

In Tuesday's post on the  Asia House Bagri Foundation Literature Festival, I said I'd check out how people in Asia could follow along via social media.

Lucy Tomlinson, PR and Marketing Manager at Asia House, had the following suggestions:

"For readers in Asia, it would be great if they could get involved by using Twitter: #AHLIT15. We’ve also recorded all of the events, and filmed many of them, so this could be a good way for those who weren’t able to come along to catch-up on what was discussed. Our Web Editor, Naomi, has also written a number of stories following events, which can be seen on the Asia House website. These condense many of the topics discussed and give a great overview of key points."

You can see Naomi's stories on the Asia House website by clicking here. 

3rd Blogger Murdered in Bangladesh

On Tuesday, yet another blogger, Anata Bijoy Das,  was hacked to death in Bangladesh, for celebrating secularism and free speech, and for questioning religious dogma and intolerance.

Here are some links to discussion of this murder from around the web:

The Daily Star (Bangladesh - the only report I could find from within Bangladesh)

Al Jazeera (English version / Qatar)

Xinhua (English version / China)

Gulf News (Dubai)

Committee to Protect Journalists (USA)

BBC (UK)

For a statement from free speech organisation PEN International click here.

Asia House Bagri Foundation Literature Festival 2015

Asia House, London, in partnership with the Bagri Foundation, is in the first few days of its annual Literature Festival. Now in its ninth year, this is the only UK Festival dedicated to pan-Asian writing and will include talks from some of the most exciting names in literature, including Turkey’s bestselling author Elif Şafak, and one of South Korea’s most important modern writers, Hwang Sok-yong.

This Week in Asian Review of Books

Asian Books Blog is not a review site. If you want reviews, see the Asian Review of Books. Here is a list of its newest reviews and round ups:

OperaHK's Das Land des Lächelns by Franz Lehar reviewed by Peter Gordon
Hong Kong Policeman by Chris Emmet reviewed by David McKirdy
A Season for Martyrs by Bina Shah reviewed byShahbano Bilgrami
The Tears of the Rajas: Mutiny, Money and Marriage in India 1805-1905 by Ferdinand Mount reviewed by Nigel Collett

The Sunday Post

Click here for a post from the OUP blog on learning from Buddhist moral psychology.

Click here for a review of Sitti Nurbaya, by Marah Rusli, translated from Bahasa Indonesian by George A. Fowler, the latest addition to the Modern Library of Indonesia, published by the Lontar Foundation.

Click here for a piece from Publishing Perspectives on book markets for literary translations. 

The shortlist for the 2015 Ondaatje Prize for a book evoking the spirit of place has been announced:

• Rana Dasgupta Capital (Canongate)
• Helen Dunmore The Lie (Hutchinson)
• Tobias Hill What Was Promised (Bloomsbury Circus)
• Justin Marozzi Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood (Allen Lane)
• Sigrid Rausing Everything is Wonderful (Grove Press)
• Elif Shafak The Architect’s Apprentice (Viking)

Writing Through: Cultivating Voices in Sala Bai, Cambodia

Student Uk Sreytouch reading her poem

Writing Through Cambodia is a programme using creative writing to improve Cambodian students’ fluency in English, both spoken and written, to develop their capacity for conceptual thought, and to enhance their self-esteem.  It also works with Cambodian teachers.

Writing Through Cambodia was founded by Sue Guiney, an American-born, British-resident poet, novelist and educator. When she is not volunteering with Writing Through Cambodia, Jeanne McKay is a conservation biologist living in Singapore, from where she manages a conservation research project in Sumatra, Indonesia. 

Jeanne and Sue collaborated on a guest post exploring the role of Writing Through Cambodia.

This Week in Asian Review of Books

Asian Books Blog is not a review site. If you want reviews, see the Asian Review of Books. Here is a list of its newest reviews and round ups:

Weekend reading: links to essays elsewhere selected by Peter Gordon
The Blind Writer by Sameer Pandya reviewed by Peter Gordon
After the Ancestors: An Anthropologist’s Story by Andrew Beatty reviewed by Tim Hannigan
Reprise: The Shadow of the Crescent Moon by Fatima Bhutto reviewed by Peter Gordon

The Sunday Post

A rojak* of items that caught my eye this week…

Indie Spotlight: G.L. Tysk

Indie Spotlight is our monthly column on self-publishing. This month, Raelee Chapman talks to indie author G.L Tysk.

G.L Tysk was born in Chicago to Hong Kong Immigrants and her novels focus on early American whaling history and its impact, 19^th century colonialism, and Asian and Pacific Islander immigrant culture. Her first novel The Sea-God at Sunrise is based on the story of John Manjiro one of the first Japanese people to live and work in America. It took four years to research and reached the quarter finals of the 2013 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards. It has also been well received on Goodreads with above 4 out of 5 stars as an average rating.  G.L Tysk’s new novel Paradise, the sequel to Sea-God at Sunrise, was released in February 2015.

This Week in Asian Review of Books

Asian Books Blog is not a review site. If you want reviews, see the Asian Review of Books. Here is a list of its newest reviews and round ups:

Poetry: excerpts from Hula Hooping byTammy Ho Lai-Ming
Partitioning the Chinese empire byRobert Nield
In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China by Michael Meyer reviewed by Joshua Bird

Like Asian Books Blog on Facebook. Follow along on Twitter:@asianbooksblog

The Sunday Post

A rojak* of items that caught my eye this week…

Q & A: English PEN

English PEN is the founding centre of a worldwide writers’ association with 145 centres in more than 100 countries. The organisation campaigns to defend writers and readers around the world whose right to freedom of expression is at risk.

PEN works to remove inequalities which prevent people’s enjoyment of, and learning from, literature. It matches writers with marginalised groups, such as refugees, and women and young people who have been victims of trafficking.

PEN promotes translation into English of published work in foreign languages which is considered to be of outstanding literary merit. Many of these works are to be found on World Bookshelf, its collection of contemporary literature in translation. Meanwhile, PEN Atlas features literary dispatches from around the world.

Erica Jarnes, Writers in Translation Programme Manager, and Cat Lucas, who runs the Writers at Risk Programme, collaborated on answering questions.

Asian Authors/Books From Asia Meetup

  At the Diana Green History lecture by Elif Shafak,  

Following on from last week’s post about Asia Bookroom, the bookshop in Australia devoted to books with Asian interest, here’s a guest post from Mariam Mathew, organizer of a book club in London devoted to discussing books by Asian authors, and books about Asia.

This Week in Asian Review of Books

Asian Books Blog is not a review site. If you want reviews, see the Asian Review of Books. Here is a list of its newest reviews and round ups:

The Bear Whispers to Me by Chang Ying-Tai, translated by Darryl Sterk reviewed by Peter Gordon
Outside reading: links to essays and articles on writing, literature, translation selected by Peter Gordon
Massage by Bi Feiyu reviewed byTimothy Sifert
Opium and Empire: The Lives and Careers of William Jardine and James Matheson by Richard J. Grace reviewed by Jonathan Chatwin

The Sunday Post: Bibliotherapy

In Asia, we’re used to supplementing antibiotics with a whole range of other therapies: Ayurveda, TCM, Malay Traditional Medicine, and so on and so forth. Now readers can try bibliotherapy: the prescribing of fiction for life’s ailments, physical, or emotional.  Or so bibliotherapists Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin suggest. They have collaborated on The Novel Cure, a pharmacopoeia – with a difference.

Teaching translation at the Chengdu Bookworm Festival / Nicky Harman

Nicky Harman is a much-acclaimed translator of Chinese into English. She focusses on fiction, poetry and occasionally literary non-fiction, by authors such as Chen Xiwo, Han Dong, Hong Ying, Xinran, Yan Geling and Zhang Ling. Her translation of Dorothy Tse's Snow and Shadow is on the longlist for the Best Translated Book Award 2015.

Nicky here writes about teaching translation, in China. 

A Day In The Life Of Asia Bookroom

A Day In The Life Of…is an occasional series in which booksellers and people working in the publishing industry talk about their working day.  Here, Lynette Thomas, of Asia Bookroom, talks about a day in the shop.

For over 30 years, Asia Bookroom, in Macquarie, Australia, has specialised in new, out of print and antiquarian books of Asian interest.

So: over to Lynette…

This Week in Asian Review of Books

Asian Books Blog is not a review site. If you want reviews, see the Asian Review of Books. Here is a list of its newest reviews:

Jim's Terrible City: JG Ballard and Shanghai by James H Bollen reviewed by John D. Van Fleet
Poetry: The Game of 100 Ghosts by Terry Watada reviewed by Todd Shimoda
The Greening of Asia: The Business Case for Solving Asia's Environmental Emergency by Mark L. Clifford reviewed by Doug Ogden
Fortune’s Ten must-read books that explain modern China reviewed by Peter Gordon.

Gunter Grass Obituaries

Gunter Grass died yesterday.  Here are six of the many obituaries being published around the world.

The Guardian (UK)
The New York Times (USA)
Spiegel Online International (Germany, in English)
The Japan Times (Japan, in English)
Aljazeera (Qatar, in English)
The Hindu (India, in English)

Bailey's Women's Fiction Prize 2015 shortlist

Bad luck to PP Wong (The Life of a Banana) and to Xiaolu Gu (I Am China) who were both on the longlist for The Bailey's Women's Fiction Prize (formerly The Orange Prize), but who failed to make the shortlist, announced yesterday.

But great news that Kamila Shamsie (A God in Every Stone) and Laline Paull (The Bees) both made the cut.

The shortlist

Author	Title	Publisher	Nationality	Notes
Rachel Cusk	Outline	Faber/Vintage	British	8thNovel
Laline Paull	The Bees	Fourth Estate	British	1stNovel
Kamila Shamsie	A God in Every Stone	Bloomsbury	Pakistani/British	6thNovel
Ali Smith	How to be Both	Hamish Hamilton	British	6thNovel
Anne Tyler	A Spool of Blue Thread	Chatto & Windus	American	20thNovel
Sarah Waters	The Paying Guests	Virago	British	6thNovel