Indians dominate 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize longlist

The Administrative Committee for the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize on Thursday announced the longlist of works for this prize.

Hong Kong: The Administrative Committee for the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize on Thursday announced the longlist of works for this prize:

Gopilal Acharya, With a Stone in My Heart

Gopilal Acharya was born in Gelephu, Bhutan, in 1978, and educated in Bhutan and Sweden. He is the author of Bhutanese Folktales (From the South and the East). He has contributed poems to a couple of international anthologies published in India. He is currently the editor of Bhutan Times, Bhutan's first private newspaper. This is his first work of fiction.

Omair Ahmad, Jimmy the Terrorist

Omair Ahmad was educated in Saudi Arabia, India and the United States. He has worked as a political adviser on Kashmir, national and international security and legislative issues, as well as a journalist in the US, UK and India. He is the author of The Storyteller's Tale (Penguin India, 2009), Sense Terra, (Pages Editor, 2008) and Encounters (Tara Press, 2007).

Siddharth Chowdhury, Day Scholar

Siddharth Chowdhury is the author of Diksha at St Martin's and Patna Roughcut. He studied English Literature at Zakir Husain and Hindu Colleges in Delhi University (1993–98). In 2007, he held the Charles Wallace Writer-in-Residence fellowship at University of Stirling 4 in Scotland. Part of Day Scholar was written there. He lives in Delhi and works in the publishing industry.

Kishwar Desai, Witness the Night

Kishwar Desai (also known as Kishwar Ahluwalia) has worked in print and broadcast media for the last 30 years as journalist, scriptwriter, TV anchor, producer and the head of a TV channel in India. Her screenplay, written in 2008, on Noor Inayat Khan, a spy for the British during World War II, has been optioned by F&ME, a British production house. In 2007, her first book, Darlingji: The True Love Story of Nargis and Sunil Dutt, was published by Harper Collins India.

Samuel Ferrer, The Last Gods of Indochine

Samuel Ferrer holds degrees from Yale and the University of Southern California, and as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar, spent a year in between degrees studying in Paris. A classically trained musician, he currently plays double bass with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra. He is a member of the Hong Kong Writer's Circle and has studied at the Iowa Summer Writer's Festival. This is his first novel.

Eric Gamalinda, The Descartes Highlands

Eric Gamalinda was born in Manila and currently divides his time between family in Manila and work in New York City. He has won several awards and grants for his writing and experimental films, including the Cultural Center of the Philippines Independent Film and Video Awards, the Asian American Literary Award, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Philippine Centennial Literary Prize, the Philippine National Book Award, the Asiaweek short story prize, and several Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards in the Philippines. In Manila, he worked as an editor for the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism. In New York, he teaches at Columbia University and also assists a non-profit organisation offering music education to inner-city public schools.

Ram Govardhan, Rough with the Smooth

Ram Govardhan was born in 1962 in the picturesque Garo Hills in the state of Assam, India. He was educated in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. He lives in Madras and is an auditor with a market research company. Rough With The Smooth is his first novel.

Kanishka Gupta, History of Hate

Kanishka Gupta is a 27-year-old writer and literary consultant based in New Delhi, India. He runs Writer's Side, India's first manuscript assessment and book editing service. In the past, he has read manuscripts for a literary agency, worked as a research assistant for the wellknown Indian author Namita Gokhale and edited some issues of a creative arts magazine. History of Hate is his first novel.

Kameroon Rasheed Ismeer, Memoirs of a Terrorist

Kamaroon Rasheed Ismeer, daughter, sister, housewife, mother of five sons, ex-journalist, teacher and aspiring writer. Ismeer has written Children's Stories for the Dar al Fatah, Sharjah, UAE. At fifty two, this is her third entry for the Man Asian Literary Prize and she hopes it will be recognised so that she may to devote herself justifiably to writing full-time.

Ratika Kapur, Overwinter

Ratika Kapur has worked in the multimedia and publishing industries. She lives in New Delhi and is currently working on her second novel.

Mariam Karim, The Bereavement of Agnes Desmoulins

Mariam Karim was born in Lucknow, India. She was educated at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi and at the Sorbonne in Paris in French Literature and Pedagogy. Her first novel, My Little Boat, published by Penguin India in 2003, was nominated for the International IMPAC Award. Mariam was Writer-in-Residence in Paris in 2005, collecting material for the submitted work. She writes for children under the name Mariam Karim-Ahlawat, and some of her children's books are translated into many Indian languages. She currently lives in New Delhi.

Sriram Karri, The Autobiography of a Mad Nation

Sriram Karri wrote his first book, History of Freedom Movement of India (1857-1947) in 1985, participating in a writing competition when he was only 12. His first published book, The Spiritual Supermarket (2007) was long-listed for the Vodafone Crossword Books Award (non-fiction category). As a journalist he worked with The Indian Express and Deccan Chronicle. This was followed by a corporate career in organisations including Infosys Technologies, Indian School of Business, Satyam Computers and Tata Consultancy Services. His weekly column, Sedition and Perdition, in The New Indian Express, and his columns for Comment is Free for Guardian, UK, have a massive following. He continues to write prolifically, including plays, short stories, and is working on his next book. He is represented by Tom Dark, Heacock Literary Agency, USA.

Nitasha Kaul, Residue

Like the protagonists of her novel Residue, Nitasha Kaul is from Kashmir but grew up in Delhi. After her degrees up to a doctorate in Economics from universities in India and England, she gave up her academic post and went travelling, writing and collecting pictures of streets. She is currently a writer and independent scholar. In addition to fiction and poetry, she has published a book on economics and philosophy. Her next book is about Bhutan, a place she feels at home.

R Zamora Linmark, Leche

Born in Manila and educated in Honolulu, R Zamora Linmark is the author of two collections of poetry, Prime Time Apparitions and The Evolution of a Sigh, both from Hanging Loose Press, and Rolling The R's (Kaya Press), a novel, which he's adapted for the stage. A recipient of numerous grants and fellowships and published in journals and anthologies in both the US and the Philippines, he currently divides his time between the Philippines and Hawaii. He is currently working on several projects, including But Beautiful, a full-length play, and another poetry collection, The Filipino Exiled Poet.

Mario I Miclat, Secrets of the Eighteen Mansions

Mario I Miclat is a professor of Asian and Philippine Studies at the University of the Philippines Diliman. He received the prestigious 2006 National Book Award for Beyond the Great Wall (Metro Manila: Anvil Publishing, Inc, 2006), co-authored with his wife and daughters and a lifetime award for Literature, the 2006 Patnubay ng Sining at Kalinangan (Art and Literature Helmsman) from the City of Manila. Miclat's other books include: Pinoy Odyssey 2049 (UP Press, 2005), Beauty for Ashes: Remembering Maningning (with Romulo P Baquiran, Jr, Anvil, 2001). Miclat is board director of the Writers Union of the Philippines and a member of the National Advisory Board of the National Commission on Culture and the Arts (NCCA). He was foreign expert at the Ministry of Radio, Film and Television of the People's Republic of China from 1971 to 1986.

Clarissa V Militante, Different Countries

Clarissa V Militante finished AB Literature at the De La Salle University, Manila (1985) as her undergraduate course. Professionally she started as a journalist, having worked as a reporter-writer for the Philippine-based news agency, Philippine News and Features in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. She also was Special Reports Editor of www.gmanews.tv in 2006. She is now a freelance editor and writer, working mostly with non-government organisations. She is currently working as short-term consultant (Knowledge Products Specialist) for the Philippine office of the Maryland-based Development Alternatives Inc.

Varuna Mohite, Omigod

Varuna Mohite was born in Bombay in 1961 and grew up in Poona and at a boarding school in the hills of Dehradun. As a child she was known as a bookworm, and books and reading continue to be an abiding passion. Most of her time as an adult has been lived in Delhi, working variously as an advertising copywriter, freelance journalist, and writer and editor of corporate literature. Presently she lives in a small village in Goa, working on a second novel, blogging and doing whatever writing and editing assignments come her way.

Dipika Mukherjee, Thunder Demons

Dipika Mukherjee was born in India, then educated in Switzerland, Indonesia, New Zealand, Malaysia and the USA. She has edited two anthologies of short stories: Silverfish New Writing 6 (Silverfish, 2006) and The Merlion and Hibiscus (Penguin, 2002). Her stories have been shortlisted for the Fish International Short Story Prize (2008) and Glimmer Train: Family Matters (2008). She also won the Platform Flash Fiction Competition in April 2009. She is a sociolinguist by training; when she is not writing fiction or poetry, she gathers data on the language patterns of diasporic communities. She currently lives in Shanghai, China.

Hena Pillai, Blackland

Hena Pillai is based in Pune. In another life, she was a journalist with The Indian Express, New Delhi and a columnist at The New Indian Express, Chennai.

Roan Ching-Yueh, Lin Xiu-Tzi and her Family

Roan Ching-yueh is Associate Professor of Department of Art Creativity and Development, Yuan Ze University, Taiwan and has published more than 20 books in both Taiwan and China including architecture and literature writings. One of his novels Lin Xiu-Zhi and Her Family was chosen 10 best Chinese books of 2004 by Yazhou Zhoukan in Hong Kong. He has won literary awards including Taiwan Literature Awards 2001, Taipei Literature Awards 2003 and Wu Yongfu Literature Awards 2003. He received his MA from University of Pennsylvania and is a licensed architect in both United States and Taiwan. Roan is also an active curator with many exhibitions inside and outside Taiwan and was selected to be the curator of Taiwan Pavilion in Venice Architecture Biennale 2006 of Paradise Revisited: Micro Cities and Non-Meta Architecture in Taiwan.

Edgar Calabia Samar, Eight Muses of the Fall

Edgar Calabia Samar is a multi-awarded poet, children's story writer, essayist and novelist, and author of recently-published Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog (or Eight Muses of the Fall) (Anvil Publishing, 2009), winner of 2005 NCCA Writer's Prize. He is also instructor of literature and creative writing at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. He is now working on his dissertation for PhD in Creative Writing at the University of the Philippines.

K Srilata, Table for Four

A poet, fiction writer and translator, Srilata teaches Creative writing and Literature at IIT Madras. Her book The Other Half of the Coconut: Women Writing Self-Respect History was published by Zubaan/Kali for Women, and she co-edited Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry published in 2009 by Penguin/Viking India. Srilata won first prize in the All India Poetry competition 1998, the Gouri Majumdar poetry prize in 2000 and the Unisun British Council poetry award 2007. Her work has been featured in The BloodAxe Anthology of Indian Poets, Penguin India's First Proofs, Fulcrum, The Little Magazine, Kavya Bharati and The Hindu. Her poetry anthology Seablue Child was published by the Brown Critique, Kolkata in 2000. Table for Four is her debut novel.

Su Tong, The Boat to Redemption

Su Tong's prolific and provocative oeuvre – six novels including Rice (2004) and My Life as Emperor (2006), a dozen novellas, more than 120 short stories – have earned him a place at the centre of China's literary scene. Su Tong belongs to that rare breed of novelist whose works enjoy perusal from both academics and the casual fan (of which he has millions). His best-known work abroad is the novella Wives and Concubines, which was made into the film Raise the Red Lantern directed by Zhang Yimou and starring Gong Li. The film garnered an Oscar (1991), and won a Bafta in 1993. Su Tong's Binu – The Myth Of Meng Jiang Nu (2006), the tale of the girl whose tears collapsed the Great Wall, sold more than 100,000 copies in China within a month of publication. It has since been sold into 15 countries and is scheduled for publication in Britain next year. Su Tong's novel, Boat to Redemption, is represented by Creative Work.

Oyungerel Tsedevdamba, Shadow of the Red Star

Oyungerel Tsedevamba was born in Mongolia's Khuvsgul Province close to the border with Siberian Russia. She received a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts in economics from universities in Russia. In 2004 she became the first Mongolian to graduate from Stanford University, where she was a Fulbright Fellow, with a Masters degree in International Policy Studies. She was selected a Yale World Fellow in 2006. For several Years, Oyungerel headed Liberty Center, a Mongolian Human Rights NGO. From 2004 to 2006 she served as adviser to the prime minister. She is currently an adviser on human rights and public participation to President Elbegdorj Tsakhia. In 2007, she authored Note on My Study in America, 2007 bestseller in Mongolia, and co-authored Nomadic Dialogues with her husband Jeffrey Falt. In 2008, Oyungerel and Jeff co-authored Green Eyed Lama (Shadow of the Red Star), which was awarded The Best Book of 2008 in Mongolia.

ABOUT MAN ASIAN LITERARY PRIZE

This longlist of 24 unpublished works of Asian fiction in English will be reviewed and evaluated by the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize judges, who will announce a shortlist of works in October 2009. The winner will be announced on Monday, 16 November at an awards ceremony in Hong Kong.

The judging panel for the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize comprises Indian writer Pankaj Mishra, Irish novelist Colm Toibin (Chair), and Chinese American author Gish Jen.

The 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize longlist was chosen from among 150 submissions received from all over Asia. The largest single group of submissions was from India, followed by the Philippines and Hong Kong. Entries came from as far afield as Bhutan, Mongolia and Myanmar as well as from China, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Pakistan. The Prize received submissions from well-established as well as first-time authors, and these included translated works as well as works originally in English. Most submissions were made by authors themselves, with a handful coming from literary agents or translators.

Chair of the Board of Directors of the Man Asian Literary Prize, David Parker, said: "We are delighted to see so many exciting entries from all over Asia. Now in its third year the Prize has established itself as a window onto the extraordinary wealth of creative talent in this part of the world."

The first Man Asian Literary Prize was awarded in November 2007. This major new literary prize aims to recognise the best of new Asian literature and to bring it to the attention of the world literary community. A distinguished panel of judges selects a single work of fiction to be awarded the prize each year. Works submitted for consideration must not yet have been published in English, although they may have been published in other languages. The Prize is jointly administered by representatives of the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival, the University of Hong and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

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