Tag Archives: Asian writing


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Kitaab call for submission: The Best Asian Crime Fiction DEADLINE EXTENDED

Kitaab – Call for Submissions

Kitaab is seeking high quality short stories for The Best Asian Crime Fiction anthology to be published in 2018.

Stories submitted should have a minimum length of 2,500 words and a maximum length of 12,000 words. Submissions that are shorter than 2,500 words or significantly longer than 12,000 will not be read or considered for inclusion in this anthology.

What we’re looking for:

We want to see strong, well-written stories that deal with some aspect of crime. It is essential that your characters be engaging and – most important – believable. Also, the plots should be credible. An appealing style is preferable, but as with all crime fiction, plot and character should be paramount.

We will be generous in our consideration of what constitutes crime. However, we don’t want to see stories about someone who simply embezzles funds from his / her office or club, gets caught and dismissed, or someone who is a bus fare cheater. The crimes should engage the interest and emotions of our readers.
We strongly encourage originality and look for novel approaches to the idea of crime fiction.

The best three stories (decided by the editor) will get cash prizes or Amazon vouchers (worth $50 each)! All selected contributors will each receive 2 complimentary copies of the final publication. 

The Best Asian Crime Fiction anthology will be edited by Richard Lord on behalf of Kitaab, Singapore.

Richard Lord has written or co-written over 20 books put out by legitimate publishers. In recent years, he has concentrated on writing and editing crime fiction. He was the editor of two popular crime fiction anthologies: Crime Scene Singapore and Crime Scene Asia. In addition to short stories included in these and three other anthologies, Lord wrote the acclaimed novel The Strangler’s Waltz, about a serial killer in 1913 Vienna.
One of his crime short stories was adapted as a TV mini-series by Singapore’s Mediacorp network, with Lord serving as script consultant and script doctor on the teleplay for this series.

Rules and regulations:

  • Submissions should be e-mailed to krimi.asia@gmail.com and to kitaab.sg@gmail.com. Submissions must be made to both ids to qualify.
  • Asians of all nationalities living anywhere in the world can send their stories. However, non-Asian authors who have resided in and written extensively about an Asian country will also be considered.
  • Submissions must be MSWORD (.doc/.docx) attachments typed double spaced in legible fonts, preferably Times New Roman 12. The submission should also be pasted within the body of the covering mail.
  • Please include an author’s bio note of 100 words.
  • The subject line of the email should read as: Submission/TBACF/author’s name.
  • Up to two submissions will be considered from each writer.
  • Translations are welcome, provided prior permissions are taken by translators from the authors. If your submission is a translation, you must note this in a message accompanying the submission.
  • Previously published work in print or online (including blogs, magazines or other online fora) will not be accepted. However, if a previously published short work has been extended into a longer piece, we will accept that longer story for consideration.
  • Simultaneous submissions will be considered. Please notify us immediately if the story is accepted elsewhere.

Last date for submissions: 15 May 2018

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‘17,000 islands of imagination’: discovering Indonesian literature

In February last year, I was sitting in Cafe Batavia on Fatahillah Square in Jakarta, talking to an Indonesian friend. We were discussing how any novelist might describe a country to a readership who know nothing about it. We were surrounded by framed photos of Indonesian politicians and Hollywood stars, and the ceiling fans turned overhead. Outside, it was hot and overcast, and students milled around the front of the History Museum, built by the Dutch in 1710 and now housing objects from the founding of Jayakarta in 1527. How could any writer portray such a diverse culture?

My friend smiled wryly. “You only have the same problem as the rest of us,” he said. “Indonesia isn’t a nation. It’s an imagination.”

There are some countries so vast and diverse that any attempt to summarise them feels insulting: such is Indonesia. With a population of 258 million, it is the world’s fourth most populous nation and the largest formed by an archipelago. When it was guest of honour at the Frankfurt book fair last year, it appeared under the banner “17,000 islands of imagination”, a phrase describing its geography but also encapsulating the complexities of representation. Indonesia is home to hundreds of different ethnicities speaking as many languages, and, along with Hindus, Christians and Buddhists, has a majority Muslim population that is the largest in the world. But, as yet, little of its literature has been translated into English.

Elizabeth Pisani is a writer and epidemiologist who has lived in Indonesia for many years. She has a simple explanation for this: ignorance. “Indonesia has no place in the British imagination,” she says. “It wasn’t a British colony and there’s virtually no Indonesian diaspora here, which means Brits aren’t even introduced to the country through food or a cultural presence.” In the absence of such historical links, can literature fill that imaginative gap?

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Kitaab call for submission: The Best Asian Crime Fiction

Kitaab – Call for Submissions

Kitaab is seeking high quality short stories for The Best Asian Crime Fiction anthology to be published in 2018.

Stories submitted should have a minimum length of 2,500 words and a maximum length of 12,000 words. Submissions that are shorter than 2,500 words or significantly longer than 12,000 will not be read or considered for inclusion in this anthology.

What we’re looking for:

We want to see strong, well-written stories that deal with some aspect of crime. It is essential that your characters be engaging and – most important – believable. Also, the plots should be credible. An appealing style is preferable, but as with all crime fiction, plot and character should be paramount.

We will be generous in our consideration of what constitutes crime. However, we don’t want to see stories about someone who simply embezzles funds from his / her office or club, gets caught and dismissed, or someone who is a bus fare cheater. The crimes should engage the interest and emotions of our readers.
We strongly encourage originality and look for novel approaches to the idea of crime fiction.

The best three stories (decided by the editor) will get cash prizes or Amazon vouchers (worth $50 each)! All selected contributors will each receive 2 complimentary copies of the final publication. 

The Best Asian Crime Fiction anthology will be edited by Richard Lord on behalf of Kitaab, Singapore.

Richard Lord has written or co-written over 20 books put out by legitimate publishers. In recent years, he has concentrated on writing and editing crime fiction. He was the editor of two popular crime fiction anthologies: Crime Scene Singapore and Crime Scene Asia. In addition to short stories included in these and three other anthologies, Lord wrote the acclaimed novel The Strangler’s Waltz, about a serial killer in 1913 Vienna.
One of his crime short stories was adapted as a TV mini-series by Singapore’s Mediacorp network, with Lord serving as script consultant and script doctor on the teleplay for this series.

 

Rules and regulations:

  • Submissions should be e-mailed to krimi.asia@gmail.com and to kitaab.sg@gmail.com. Submissions must be made to both ids to qualify.
  • Asians of all nationalities living anywhere in the world can send their stories. However, non-Asian authors who have resided in and written extensively about an Asian country will also be considered.
  • Submissions must be MSWORD (.doc/.docx) attachments typed double spaced in legible fonts, preferably Times New Roman 12. The submission should also be pasted within the body of the covering mail.
  • Please include an author’s bio note of 100 words.
  • The subject line of the email should read as: Submission/TBACF/author’s name.
  • Up to two submissions will be considered from each writer.
  • Translations are welcome, provided prior permissions are taken by translators from the authors. If your submission is a translation, you must note this in a message accompanying the submission.
  • Previously published work in print or online (including blogs, magazines or other online fora) will not be accepted. However, if a previously published short work has been extended into a longer piece, we will accept that longer story for consideration.
  • Simultaneous submissions will be considered. Please notify us immediately if the story is accepted elsewhere.

Last date for submissions: 31 March 2018

 


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16 Writers on Their Favourite Translated Titles From Across Asia

Earlier this year, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop launched the Transpacific Literary Project, an editorial initiative to publish new and exciting writing from across East and Southeast Asia on The Margins while building a body of work that might help us better understand the importance of the Pacific World to literature. In an increasingly divided world, translated literature brings us closer together. As the year draws to a close, we asked some of our most beloved writers—from Viet Thanh Nguyen and Kimiko Hahn to Hari Kunzru and Tash Aw—to tell us about their favorite books in translation out of Asia and the Asian diaspora. Collected below are works that meditate through medieval texts, reimagine the immigrant story, and above all explore selfhood in surroundings.

Red Dust by Ma Jian, translated by Flora Drew

In 1983, Ma Jian, a painter and poet, became the target of a rectification session during China’s 1983 Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign. A colleague began the denunciation by saying: “I asked why a face in one of [Ma Jian’s] paintings looked like the face of a corpse. He laughed and said everyone puts on a mask but underneath our souls are ugly shameful things. He said we are born in a daze and die in a dream . . . He sees life as a great blackness. I feel he should confront his disturbed psychology.”

Alerted that his arrest is imminent, Ma Jian leaves his home in Beijing. Barred from leaving the country, he instead walks a path through it, traversing thousands of kilometres. His book, Red Dust, documents a movement through levels of containment: the captive mind looking for a doorway out into the world, or deeper into oneself. Red Dust is a book I have read a dozen times. It is a despairing, bawdy, provocative portrait of the artist, a memoir that creates its own form, asking, How can one be free in one’s mind when one’s body lives within an authoritarian state? How to see through the red dust of illusion?

Of his country, Ma Jian has written, “There is a collective fear of truth.” I grieve that the same can be said of all our countries; we are living in a conflicted age of revolution and denunciation, an age in which we abandon one another at our peril. The call to each of us to question ourselves, to think for ourselves, is urgent. “You have about twenty thousand days left before you die,” he writes. “Why are you wasting your life? You must focus your mind and do something.”

—Madeleine Thien

Madeleine Thien is the author of several books including Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which won the 2016 Governor General’s Award for English-language fiction and was a finalist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. Her second novel Dogs at the Perimeter was just published in the United States by W.W. Norton this year.

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‘The Best Asian Short Stories, 2017’ from Kitaab

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The stories in this anthology by Asia’s best known and well-respected contemporary writers and promising new voices, offer fresh insights into the experience of being Asian. They transcend borders and social and political divisions within which they arise. While drawing us into the lives of people and the places where they come from, they raise uneasy questions and probe ambiguities.

Explore Asia through these tales of the profound, the absurd, the chilling, and of moments of epiphany or catharsis. Women probe their own identities through gaps between social blinkers and shackles. A young Syrian mother flees from war-ravaged Aleppo into a more fearsome hell. The cataclysmic Partition of India and its aftershocks; life and death in a no-man’s land between two countries; ethnic groups forced into exile; are all part of the wider Asian experience.

Life flows on in the pauses between cataclysms, bringing hope. Fragile dreams spread rainbow wings through the struggle to succeed socially, earn a living, produce an heir, and try to grasp at fleeting joys and love. These symphonies of style and emotions sweep across Asia – from Jordan and Syria to Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Japan and Korea. Crafted with love, they continue to resonate after the last page.

As editor Moniddepa Sahu says, these stories come ‘from the heart of Asia, not from the Western perspective trying to make sense of the quaint and the exotic. The home-grown Asian identity runs as a strong undercurrent, with no need to explain and offer apologetic footnotes.’


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Andrea Pasion-Flores: Pushing the Asian Agenda

andrea“Asians have far too long been the consumer of books from the West and I speak from a country where many kids know the stories of the West better than their own canon, much less the younger writers,” says Andrea Pasion-Flores in this exclusive interview with Kitaab. “I am sure this is not just true for the Philippines but for many Asian countries.”

Andrea is the first literary agent from the Philippines, working from the Philippines. Recently, she joined Jacaranda Literary Agency as an agent. Jacaranda is one of Asia’s most well-known literary agencies with offices in Singapore, India, Kenya and the Philippines.

Based in Manila, Philippines, Andrea is a copyright lawyer and she teaches English at the University of the Philippines as a member of the faculty of the Department of English and Comparative Literature.  She is also the author of a bestselling book, Have Baby Will Date, published by Summit Media. Her forthcoming collection of stories For Love and Kisses will be published by the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House in January 2014. Continue reading →