News feature: Top Book Prize for Asia-Pacific

Next Generation Story Prize Tipped for Asia-Pacific Writer

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PERTH, AUSTRALIA: Win one of the world’s biggest literary prizes—from the keypad of your mobile phone.

The next generation book prize is here, and someone from Asia-Pacific is expected to cash in.

One of the world’s richest and most innovative literary awards is to be launched later this year—and will be judged by an East Asian author.

The revolutionary AALA prize, worth more than US$100,000, is open to cutting-edge novels designed to be read on mobile phones and computers, as well as traditional books.

The award is open to publishers worldwide, without the geographical restrictions of most other awards, although the book has to be set in Asia-Pacific.

Hong Kong crime writer Nury Vittachi, a syndicated columnist, will chair the panel of judges for the new prize.

The full name of the AALA is the Western Australian Premier’s Australia-Asia Literary Award. Winners will receive a cash payment of A$110,000 (US$103,000), making the prize far larger than the US$10,000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and putting it in the same league as the UK’s Man Booker Prize, which also stands at about US$100,000, depending on exchange rates.

               “This is a fabulous vote of confidence,” said Vittachi, who is chairing a three-strong judging panel. “It shows that while the West may have dominated popular culture up to now, it is time for world-class creativity from the eastern side of the planet to take its rightful place on the global stage.”

The Sri Lanka-born author will be joined by Kamila Shamsie, a Karachi-born author who judged the UK’s Orange Prize for Fiction, and a third judge, shortly to be announced.

Initial details of the award were revealed in Perth, Australia, by Mr Vittachi and Alan Carpenter, Premier of Western Australia.  The prize has been financed by the government of Western Australia as part of a major spending programme to make the area under its jurisdiction a regional hub for the arts. Entries for the new award are invited immediately, with the winner of the inaugural prize to be announced in the fall of this year. Entry forms are available on the Internet, at: www.dca.wa.gov.au. The closing date for books for this year is May 31.

In Japan, many of the recent top bestsellers were written on mobile phones and designed to be read on tiny screens. Readers in China also have an appetite for screen-published works. But while the new award is open to books published in new media formats, it excludes self-published works, thus avoiding vanity publishing projects.

Book industry executives in Asia and Australia see the new prize as an Asia-Pacific “Booker” and are enthusiastic about the message it presents to the world. Writing from Asians and Australians has made major inroads into world culture in recent years, with authors such as Thomas Keneally and Kiran Desai winning major awards.

Background: Book prizes

While the Man Booker Prize is arguably the world’s best known literary prize, it is limited to authors from the British Commonwealth and Ireland. A related prize, the Man Booker International Award, does not have geographical limitations, but is presented for a body of work, not for a specific book. The same is true for the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is for a single book, but is open to US authors only. In cash terms, the richest award is the IMPAC, a 100,000 Euro award presented in Dublin for books nominated by libraries around the world.
     The Kiriyama Prize is sometimes described as an Asian book award, but is actually a US prize, limited to Asia-themed books from North American publishing houses. Purely Asian book prizes do exist, but are generally very limited in scope, language range, cash size and publicity level.

For general queries, write to:
literaryawards@dca.wa.gov.au

To speak to someone about the award, contact:

Shauna Weeks (press officer)

Department of Culture and the Arts

Level 7, 573 Hay Street

Perth, Western Australia, WA 6000

Tel. +61 8 9224 7327

To speak to the chair of the judging panel, contact:

Nury Vittachi

P504 Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Hunghom, Kowloon, Hong Kong

nury@vittachi.com

Tel. +852 9806 8866

Comments

[Kal-el]

whew, mr jam, how do you do it? some sort of massive new venture every ten minutes. I must say its fantastic that someone is organizing things which encouraging the creative arts in Asia. Asia is so dominated by the money making instinct, it really needs a bit of focus on creativity and the arts. im intrigued by the tech angle of this too must admit.

[gweipo]

and it only managed to get a 10 line mention at the bottom of the City section of the SCMP. Weird?

[Lasse]

The scmp always misses the best stories especially when they are right under their noses. i mean from my point of view this is one of the best literary detective stories in asia in the past few years. nuri got the Asian man booker prize going last year and then it was taken from him by some extremely unsavory activities, shall we say. instead of maoning about it, he does another literary prize a zillion times bigger. i wonder how those people feel now.