The Hong Kong-based Man Asian Literary Prize has announced the shortlist for its 2012 prize. Of the five finalists, culled from an original long list of fifteen, one winner will receive an award of thirty thousand dollars.  

The shortlisted finalists include: Musharraf Ali Farooqi of Pakistan for Between Clay and Dust (Aleph), Hiromi Kawakami of Japan for The Briefcase (Counterpoint Press), Orhan Pamuk of Turkey for Silent House (Knopf), Tan Twan Eng of Malaysia for The Garden of Evening Mists (Myrmidon Books), and Jeet Thayil of India for Narcopolis (Faber and Faber).

The chair of judges, international journalist and cultural critic Maya Jaggi, selected the shortlist along with her fellow judges, Vietnamese American novelist Monique Truong and Indian novelist Vikram Chandra. The winner will be announced on March 14 at the prize ceremony in Hong Kong.

The international award is given annually for a novel by an Asian writer, written in or translated into English and published during the previous year. For more information, visit the Man Asian Literary Prize online.

In the video below, David Parker, executive director of the prize, announces the shortlist, and Maya Jaggi is interviewed about the final five selections.

Choose a topic with currency that you feel personally connected to and want to explore through writing. Research statistics, facts, and events related to it. Weave these with personal anecdotes that are also related. For example, if the topic is gun control, write an essay that combines statistics about how many people own guns in the United States, factual stories about incidents of gun violence, and personal anecdotes about how you learned to hunt growing up. Strive to explore the complexity of the topic.

We each have our own approach to writing stories—some writers compose quickly and broadly, leaving the sentence-level refinements for later, while others labor over each sentence until its worded just right before moving on. Identify which kind of writer you are. Then revise a story you’ve been working on, applying the approach you don’t normally take. 

The Minneapolis-based publisher Milkweed Editions is currently accepting submissions for the second annual Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry. The prize, open to poets who live in the upper Midwest, offers an award of $10,000 and publication for a poetry collection. The deadline is January 31.

Poets who currently reside in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, or Wisconsin are eligible to submit a previously unpublished, book-length poetry manuscript by postal mail. There is no entry fee. Five finalists will be selected by the editors of Milkweed Editions, and the winner will be chosen by this year’s judge, poet G. C. Waldrep, whose most recent book is Archicembalo (Tupelo Press, 2009). Visit the Milkweed website for complete eligibility and submissions guidelines.

Founded in 1980, Milkweed Editions is an independent press whose mission is to “identify, nurture, and publish transformative literature, and build an engaged community around it.” The partnership between Milkweed Editions and the Minneapolis-based law offices of Lindquist & Vennum “celebrates poets for their artistic contributions, and brings outstanding regional writers to a national stage.” 

The inaugural Lindquist & Vennum Prize, judged by poet Peter Campion (The Lions, University of Chicago Press, 2009), was awarded in 2012 to Patricia Kirkpatrick of St. Paul for her collection Odessa. To hear Kirkpatrick read three poems from her winning collection, published this past December by Milkweed Editions, visit our podcast page or click on the Soundcloud player below.