Thursday 16 April 2015

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. 

Tuesday 14 April 2015

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


AuthorTitlePublisherNationalityNotes
Rachel CuskOutlineFaber/VintageBritish8thNovel
Laline PaullThe BeesFourth EstateBritish1stNovel
Kamila ShamsieA God in Every StoneBloomsburyPakistani/British6thNovel
Ali SmithHow to be BothHamish HamiltonBritish6thNovel
Anne TylerA Spool of Blue ThreadChatto & WindusAmerican20thNovel
Sarah WatersThe Paying GuestsViragoBritish6thNovel

Thursday 9 April 2015

Q & A: Julianne Schultz / New Asia Now

Griffith Review is Australia’s leading literary quarterly. Each issue is themed. Recent editions have covered topics as varied as renewal after natural disaster (Surviving, edition 35), globalisation (Small World, edition 37), and migration within the Pacific, (Pacific Highways, edition 43).  Each themed collection features a mix of essays, memoir, reportage, short fiction, poetry and visual essays by emerging and established authors who tease out the complexities of the subjects and events under discussion.

Wednesday 8 April 2015

Big Brother Mouse / Ann Bennett

Ann Bennett’s novel Bamboo Heart won the inaugural Asian Books Blog Book of The Lunar Year Award, for the Year of the Horse – click here for details.  Ann’s (ahem) prize was to write a guest blog about a charity dedicated to promoting literacy in Asia... 

My chosen charity is one you probably won’t have heard of. It is called Big Brother Mouse and is based in Luang Prabang in Laos. Before I stumbled across it I did a fair amount of internet surfing, and made enquiries of several friends with knowledge of the region. I discovered that there are many projects working on improving literacy in Asia, including UNESCO, and other well-known names such as Save the Children.