Samantha Kuok-Leese

Monday

Samantha Kuok-Leese

Interview with a writer: Jhumpa Lahiri, author of Booker longlisted The Lowland

From our UK edition

The Lowland is the magnificent new novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, which has been longlisted for this year's Man Booker prize. It tells the story of two brothers, Subhash and Udayan, who come of age in Calcutta in the late 1960s. ‘Subhash was thirteen, older by fifteen months. But he had no sense of himself without Udayan. From his earliest memories, at every point, his brother was there,’ writes Lahiri. This was the beginning of a troubled period in West Bengal, as a radical communist movement known as the Naxalite cause swept through the region, inciting idealistic young men, in particular, to violence and acts of terror.

Tuesday

Samantha Kuok-Leese

Chan Koon Chung – banned in China

From our UK edition

Chan Koon Chung’s previous novel, The Fat Years, was set in a gently dystopian Beijing of 2013, when a whole month is missing from the Chinese public’s awareness, and everyone is inexplicably happy. Since it first appeared in 2009, the novel has enjoyed cult success in both Chinese and English translation, even becoming, as Julia Lovell notes in her preface, a chic take-home gift from society hostesses in mainland China. It has shades of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, although the setting of The Fat Years may not be as brutal as either of those. Certainly, to read it now is eerie, so much has reality caught up with Chan’s fiction.

Samantha Kuok-Leese

23 years later

From our UK edition

'Let us learn how to live life with honour and dignity and a wealth of humanity.' — Liu Xiaobo, 2000 June fourth will mark the 23rd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, a tragedy which remains unacknowledged by the Chinese government except in the weakest of euphemisms. On that day, the state used martial law to repress violently a peaceful demonstration for democracy in Beijing's city square, which translates as the Gate of Heavenly Peace.  Each spring, Liu Xiaobo has written an 'offering' to the memory of June 4, 1989. The poems he composed until 2009 have been collected here as June Fourth Elegies.

Wednesday

Samantha Kuok-Leese

The world has yet to see the best of Chinese literature

From our UK edition

- Hong Kong  Imagine if every British novel published since the 1940s was about the Second World War. That’s about as accurate a view of contemporary China held by readers in the Anglophone West, say experts here. On the eve of this year’s Man Asian Literary Prize announcement, it’s worth considering why that’s still the case. The prize celebrates Asian literature written in, or translated into, English. While eligible authors span the continent from Japan to Iran, all previous winners have come from East Asia, and three out of those five from China. Harvey Thomlinson, a Hong Kong-based publisher, also had a mission to highlight quality Chinese literature in English translation.

Friday

Samantha Kuok-Leese

Katie Kitamura interview

From our UK edition

Gone to the Forest is Katie Kitamura's second novel, about a family and the cost of European colonization in an unknown time and place. Tom and his father live on a farm in a country that recalls, at first and most often, J.M Coetzee's South Africa. It is on the brink of civil war. The novel opens with a broadcast by the land's natives, which Tom overhears on a radio that has been left, eerily, on the homestead's verandah. The men's strained relationship is compounded when a sly young woman, Carine, comes to live with them. Their sinister dealings with each other, the other white farmers and servants expose the fissures of a hard and unforgiving society, which threaten to engulf them all. Kitamura writes with fine tension and clipped grace. Her observations are subtle and sharp.

Tuesday

Samantha Kuok-Leese

North Korea’s darkest secret

From our UK edition

There are concentration camps in North Korea. We can see them clearly, via high-resolution satellite images on Google Earth. There are six of them, according to South Korean intelligence, and the largest is bigger than the city of Los Angeles. Of the six, four camps are 'complete control districts' where 'irredeemable' prisoners are worked to death in gruesome conditions, under threat of starvation, torture and public execution. While inside, they are shut off from the rest of the world so totally that those born within the high voltage barbed-wire perimeter are unaware even of who Kim Jong Il was.  The other two camps have 're-education zones', from which 'loyal' prisoners can be released but only to spend the rest of their lives under constant state surveillance.

Thursday

Samantha Kuok-Leese

History is made at the Man Asian Literary Prize

From our UK edition

- Hong Kong South Korean author Kyung-sook Shin has become the first woman to win the Man Asian Literary Prize for her novel Please Look After Mother, which tells the story of a family's heartbreaking search  for their mum after she goes missing from a Seoul subway station. During a black-tie dinner hosted at the Conrad hotel in Hong Kong, BBC Special Correspondent and chair of this year's judging  panel Razia Iqbal announced the winner of Asia's most prestigious prize for literature. She said the reason they chose Shin's book is because it is "an amazing story",  beautifully written and poignantly told,  through a compelling structure of different narrative voices.

Monday

Samantha Kuok-Leese

Authors rail against attack on free speech in India

From our UK edition

Jaipur — It was a sad weekend here for freedom of speech, as the Rushdie controversy took one strange turn after another. Having read from the banned The Satanic Verses on Friday night, in protest of Rushdie's absence at the festival, writers Hari Kunzru, Amitava Kumar, Ruchir Joshi and Jeet Thayil were advised by lawyers to leave Jaipur or risk arrest by Rajasthan authorities. By Saturday evening Kunzru was in Bangkok with his fiancée, the novelist Katie Kitamura, who had also been scheduled to speak at the festival. She said in an email that 'the situation developed incredibly fast, and we were obliged to leave the country almost immediately'. Kunzru later clarified on Twitter that he had left India of his own volition.

Friday

Samantha Kuok-Leese

Festival organisers threatened with arrest over Rushdie controversy

From our UK edition

Jaipur - In a dramatic end to the first day of the Jaipur Literature Festival, four writers rallied in support of Salman Rushdie by reading from The Satanic Verses. The book has been banned in India since 1988. As a result, a warrant was issued for the festival organizers; arrests which, at time of writing, have not been resolved.   In a statement made earlier today, Rushdie said he would not travel to Jaipur as planned because of intelligence reports that paid assassins were being sent from Mumbai to kill him. The author wrote on Twitter, "Very sad not to be at jaipur. I was told bombay mafia don issued weapons to 2 hitmen to 'eliminate' me. Will do video link instead. Damn." [sic] At a talk scheduled for 5.