JIANG RONG won the Man Asian Literary Prize. Not my choice of winner – in fact, not my choice of entrant. Not sure what a guy who already has a massive global publishing deal doing in a contest designed to bring new talent to the stage. But then what do I know?
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MALAYSIAN TERRORISTS in the US are the theme of a fiction manuscript called Yellow Medicine, just sold by author A N Smith to US publisher Bleak House, I heard this week. The story is about a corrupt sheriff’s deputy in rural Minnesota who discovers terrorists on his patch. All sounds a bit far-fetched to me (and I can’t see the Malaysian tourist board supporting it), but fiction is fiction. People can say what they like about who they like (except in China, where everything has to be positive).
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IN HONG KONG, Batman is the talk of the town. The crew is here filming The Dark Knight, which is the next movie in the series. Interesting tidbit: the Batman comic series was almost cancelled in the 1960s due to lack of sales (shortly after Marvel Comics stole the show by launching Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four). But the Batman series limped on until 1986, when a comic-book series called The Dark Knight Returns was launched. It tells the tale of Batman as a retired superhero aged 50, deciding to don his costume and get back into action. (Yes, the story was nicked for the movie The Incredibles.)
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MORE ASIA-RELATED literary news. Angus Lorenzen has sold a manuscript called A Lovely Little War to a US publisher called History Publishing. It is a memoir, telling the story of life in a Japanese internment camp in Manila during World War II. Lorenzen was 10 years old at the time. It will hit the shelves in September 2008.
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THE LITERARY prize discussion site run by Indians is thriving, I’m thrilled to say. I’m sure they’d love your input, so do have a visit: www.themanasianliteraryprize.org
