Something wrong here
Look up lists of the world’s top 100 books, movies, music albums and so on, and what do you find? They are dominated by North American and European productions.
Lists created in the East are not very different. We in Asia also love Western cultural products, from Beethoven to the Beatles.
But where are the Asian names on those lists? They are almost completely absent.
There's something wrong here. Historians agree that for virtually the whole of recorded human history, Asia has been one of the most creative parts of the world.
The fact is, the imbalance is recent—and is an anomaly that will eventually be righted. We can all do our part in this process.
Setting it to rights
We could have contributed by simply setting up another Asians-only book prize to replace the Man Asian Literary Prize, which took years of work to set up. Why didn’t we?
Because such regional prizes make sense in a world divided into relatively homogenous individual portions. But that’s not the planet on which we live.
Consider this.
If you add up all the people in North America, all the people in Western Europe, and all the people in all the African countries, the total would still be less than the population of Asia NOT COUNTING THE PEOPLES OF CHINA AND INDIA.
Those extra two-point-five billion people would have to be added to the top.
That's a lot of people, right? In number terms, the human world is dominated by Asia.
To create an Asians-only prize is to do something that none of us want to do: we’d be giving a privilege to a majority by excluding a minority.
As globalization spreads, and our awareness of the composition of people on this planet will grow, all this will become increasingly self-evident.
We want to stay ahead of the game. And that's why we see the human world as it is: as a group which is not homogenous, but is still a single community. And for that reason, the World Readers' Award neither excludes the majority population (as the 100 best books lists do) nor the minority population (as an Asia-only prize would).
(Pic at the top shows members of APWriters at a meeting called Writing The Future)
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