A brief history of the Man Asian Literary Prize and other book awards for writers in the region
(From left to right: Amit Chowdhury, Mother Teresa, Mohammad Yunus, Tarzie Vittachi)
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By Nury Vittachi
WRITERS BASED IN ASIA—want to make it big? Prizes definitely help. And not just for novelists. Increasingly, film financing is determined on the basis of awards won. The day before writing this I just learned that one of my young students had won the right to co-direct a full-length feature film.
But what prizes are you eligible for? Which awards are worth winning? In this essay, we’ll start off just looking at international prizes for fiction. And we’ll start with a history lesson.
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The first literary awards in Asia were intended to be eastern Nobel Prizes.
In 1957, the Rockefeller Foundation launched a series of awards in Asia, modeled on the more famous Swedish prizes. The Magsaysay Award, named after an assassinated president in the Philippines, was, like the Nobel, a wide-ranging, multi-faceted award, with titles for writers, community workers, people promoting peace and so on.
But after an initial burst of publicity, the Magsaysay Award rarely made the headlines in the West. In those days, the international media was largely from Europe and North America and focused on those places (with a tiny number of honorable exceptions, such as the Far Eastern Economic Review). Today things are—well, not that different, and we don’t even have the Review any more.
But the Magsaysay was a good prize, nonetheless, and judges successfully identified some amazing people.
Among the early winners of the Magsaysay Award were (photos above):
- Mother Teresa, a nun in Calcutta;
- Amit Chowdhury, a journalist in India;
- Muhammad Yunus, a banker in Bangladesh and
- Tarzie Vittachi, a journalist in Sri Lanka.
The last of these was a bit distracted that year—his wife gave birth to a son just before he received the literature part of the prize in 1959. Yes, the baby was me.
The same year, a novel called Dr No was published in the UK, and it featured a surprise figure who would change the way literature would be graded for ever.
His name was Bond.
James Bond.
