This week, our editors from around the globe are bringing news concerning the pressing issues of our time, from literature and its manifold intersections. From Ukraine, writers are publishing pertinent and vivid texts within the throes of war. In India, the Jaipur Literary Festival boasts an impressive line-up, including most recent Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah. In Hong Kong, the prestigious Liang Shih-chiu Literature Prize announces its winners. Read on to find out more!
Kristina Tatarian, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Ukraine
Nominated by the Polish Institute of Sciences, one of the most promising young writers in Ukraine, Serhiy Zhadan, is in this year’s runner-up list for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Among his most notable works is The Orphanage, a novel about the war in Ukraine translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler.
Reinforced by the international community, many Ukrainian writers have been extremely prolific, having emotive, cool-headed reads published in the international press; certain autofictional pieces provide the public with crucial information while relegating to the outside world the feelings of our own. Among them is the war diary of Yuliya Iliukha from Kharkiv—authentic, full of bitterness, hatred, and a sense of impotence; the Kyiv chronicle by Oleksandr Mykhed, translated by Marina Gibson, starts with a tentative description of his unfinished first play, interrupted by the start of the war; a letter from Kyiv by Luyba Yakimchuk, translated by Jennifer Croft, tells us about the power of language to turn into a gunshot.
TAULT, with Zenia Tompkins as its head, has encouraged the war efforts of Ukrainian writers who have laid down their pens and joined the fight for freedom. In the words of TAULT’s associate director Kate Tsurkan, literary translators and writers around the world must join the global translating efforts to “elevate Ukrainian voices right now.” This urgency is felt in the recent publications of Ukrainian literature. Stanislaw Aseyev’s In Isolation—for which he was imprisoned and tortured—speaks about the influence of propaganda in eastern Ukraine, as well as how the place and its people have transformed after the invasion. Another notable work is Larysa Denysenko’s new children’s novel Maya and Her Friends, published in the UK. It is a philanthropic and literary statement about how war ends or cripples our future—an urgent appeal with the “weapon of words” to the international community. In the darkest times like these, it is these kinds of stories we tell our children that have the power to discredit the malignant justifications of evil—for good.
Matilde Ribeiro, Copy Editor, reporting from India
On March 9, 2022, the Indian-born literary theorist and Marxist scholar Aijaz Ahmad died in California; the author’s famous essay, Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory,” was a significant contribution to the discourse surrounding the broadening of Western literature’s so-called canon, looking at how literature from non-Western countries is read in the Western context. Written as a response to Jameson’s generalisation that third-world texts are necessarily national allegories—in which “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society”—the essay criticises this forced creation of an ideal type in world literature, and draws from Ahmad’s own understanding of Urdu poetry to emphasise that “the ideological conditions of a text’s production are never singular but always several.”
Ahmad also edited Ghazals of Ghalib, an anthology that aimed to take the poet’s work to the West by combining his ghazals with Ahmad’s own literal translations, as well as reinterpretations of these works by authors like W.S. Merwin, William Stafford, Mark Strand, and Adrienne Rich. This book helped introduce the ghazal as a poetic form in English, opening up the way for authors like Rich, Merwin, Edward Lowbury and Phyllis Webb to use the metrical and highly allusive form as a vessel for ideas ranging from racial politics, feminist themes, and anti-war activism. Ahmad also encouraged the growth of progressive, independent publishers in India, such as Leftword, whose official Twitter handle hailed him as “our theoretical rudder.”
Perhaps the most important event of the Indian literary scene, the Jaipur Literary Festival began online on March 5, and in-person at the upmarket Clarks Amer hotel in Jaipur on March 10. The event featured a wide-ranging line-up of speakers, including 2021 Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah and Booker Prize winner Damon Galgut, well-known authors and journalists like Colm Tóibín, Sudhir Hazareesingh, Ilan Pappé, Jeet Thayil, Jeffrey Gettleman, Ranjit Hoskote, Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, Onyeka Nwelue, and Meena Kandasamy, as well as people better known for work outside the literary field, such as the economist Abhijit Banerjee, television newscaster Barkha Dutt, and musicians Usha Uthup and Remo Fernandes.
The largest event of its kind, the JLF’s impact is undeniable in a country where only about three-fourths of the population is literate, but sales of print and e-books continue to rise; it has played an important role in spotlighting works by women and members of marginalised communities—which might not have reached such a large audience otherwise. However, in a deeply polarised nation, the JLF continually grapples with the question of how big a role politics should be allowed to play in the literary scene; in 2017, having included members of the right-wing nationalist organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh on a panel, the festival sparked controversy.
Amazon India’s decision to shut down its Westland Books imprint, which published major works of Indian literature in English, as well as translations from other languages, continues to have ramifications in the publishing industry. The scheduled shutdown is at the end of March, and publishing rights will revert to the authors by April.
However, Westland authors represent a relatively privileged part of the literary spectrum in India, where authors writing in local languages are often underpaid. This issue came up in March when Sahitya Akademi award-winning author Vinod Kumar Shukla, who writes in Hindi, revealed to a local media channel that he was earning only Rs 20,000 (US $261) in royalties annually from two publishers, for his nine published books.
Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong:
Heading into March, Hong Kong remains in its most severe Omicron outbreak yet; ordinary life is largely suspended, events are cancelled, and the city is sealing itself off from the rest of the world. Due to a number of policy factors, Hong Kong has the highest official COVID-19 death rate per capita in the world. For many people, this period has been paralyzing, though there is reassurance to be found in a few pieces of good news.
Xi Xi, a quintessential writer of her generation, released her latest novel The Imperial Astronomer (欽天監) in late February. She cites several inspirations for her work: Edwin A. Abbott’s fictional two-dimensional world where characters are geometric figures, Leibniz’s invention of the binary code after reading cosmological hexagrams from I Ching, and Kangxi Emperor’s 700,000-square-meter toy factory. All these are representative of Xi Xi’s fascinations—her propensity for magical realism, profuse knowledge of Chinese and Western literature, and a love for handmade dollhouses and teddy bears and puppets, which have helped her recover from post-operative treatment for breast cancer.
On March 2, the thirty-fourth Liang Shih-chiu Literature Prize announced its winners. Among the shortlist, Tung Chiao and Hon Lai-chu were selected as Honorable Mentions for Short Prose with Conversations with Literary Luminaries (文林回想錄) and Half Eclipse (半蝕) respectively. Comprising fifty-five chapters, Conversations with Literary Luminaries traces Tung’s recollections of writers and critics who have made an impression on his career. Half Eclipse, a continuation of Hon’s award-winning Darkness Under the Sun, is a diary-like prose collection about life in the aftermath of the Hong Kong protests and the ongoing pandemic.
Cha: An Asian Literary Journal is now accepting poetry submissions for a new series “Fight with Words, Write to Power.” Edited by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho and Lian-Hee Wee, it will feature original and translated poems with an Asian focus, continually evidencing the empowerment of words in speaking out against oppressive systems and other forms of authority—a space for solace as the city fights for its well-being.
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