Prize Winning Cultural Journalist And Novelists Announced As Judges For The 2012 Man Asian Literary Prize

Press Release

HONG KONG – A leading international literary critic, along with two Asian born prize winning novelists are set to judge the 2012 Man Asian Literary Prize, as submissions open for the most prestigious literary prize in Asia.

Chairing this year's judges will be award winning cultural journalist and literary critic, Maya Jaggi. She has reported on arts and culture from five continents, and is an influential voice on world literature having interviewed 12 Nobel prizewinners in literature, as well as figures from Eric Hobsbawm and Noam Chomsky to Salman Rushdie and Tom Stoppard. The late cultural critic Edward Said described her interview with him as in a class of its own.
Jaggi has been a judge of literary awards including the Orange, Commonwealth Writers, David Cohen, Warwick and Guardian fiction prizes, as well as the Caine prize for African writing, the Banipal prize for Arabic literary translation, and the Harvill Secker/Foyles Young Translators' prize. Educated at Oxford University and the London School of Economics, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by Britain's Open University in 2012 for her outstanding contribution to education and culture, especially in "extending the map of international writing."
Joining Jaggi on the panel will be award winning Vietnamese-American novelist Monique Truong and Vikram Chandra, most notably winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize.
Truong is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her first novel, The Book of Salt (2003), was a national bestseller, a New York Times Notable Fiction Book, and the recipient of many awards including the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. Her second novel, Bitter in the Mouth (2010) also received critical acclaim. Born in Saigon, South Vietnam, in 1968, Truong and her family came to the United States as refugees in 1975. A graduate of Yale and Columbia Universities, Truong is currently a 2012 Visiting Writer at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.
Vikram Chandra's latest novel, Sacred Games, was the recipient of the Hutch Crossword Prize for English Fiction (India), a Salon.com Book Award for Fiction (USA), and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (USA). He is also the author of Love and Longing in Bombay and Red Earth and Pouring Rain. His previous honours include the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Eurasia region) and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, the David Higham Prize, and the Paris Review Discovery prize. He currently divides his time between Bombay and Berkeley, California, where he teaches creative writing at the University of California.
Chair of Judges of the 2012 Man Asian Literary Prize, Maya Jaggi said, "I am excited to be chairing the jury for Asia's premier literary award. As a prize that is pan-Asian and multilingual in scope, it recognises the importance of translation in bringing the continent's literature to readers across Asia, as well as to the world."

The winner of the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize, Please Look After Mom by Kyung-sook Shin has gone on to sell over 2 million copies worldwide. The South Korean writer became the first female and South Korean writer to win the Man Asian Literary Prize in its five year history, and was awarded the USD $30,000 prize money in March 2012.


Submissions for the 2012 Man Asian Literary Prize are now open until 31st August, 2012. Submissions are called from publishers, based in any country, of novels written by Asian authors.
The longlist will be announced on 4th December 2012, the shortlist on 9th January 2013 and the winner announced at a black tie Prize Dinner on 14th March 2013 in Hong Kong, the home of the Prize.


For full entry rules and further information please visit www.manasianliteraryprize.org