– 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.
Iqbal observed that It is at once an intimate portrait of a family’s search for their mother and an insight into Korea after the Korean War: ‘Looking through the microcosm of the family, [we see] how the country is moving into modernity, leaving behind its traditional rural ways of life.’
The other two judges were Pulitzer-prize nominee and head of the Creative Writing programme at Princeton University Chang-rae Lee and Vikas Swarup, who wrote the novel Q&A which became the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire.
Swarup said that Please Look After Mother was the most complete novel on the shortlist of seven, which was announced in January, with Lee adding that it was ‘a total performance’. Iqbal also revealed that the winner was not a close call.
Please Look After Mother, which was published in South Korea in 2009, is already a huge commercial success having sold 1.93 million copies in the author’s home country to date. The book is translated by Chi-young Kim, who worked closely with Shin on the English version. It is set to be published in 32 countries.
In an interview the day before the winner’s announcement, Shin said that she felt her book had been set free, now that it was able to reach a wider, international audience. She explained that the reaction to her story has been so similar across all languages, because in modern society ‘we all live like orphans.’
Asked what she’d like her readers to take away from Please Look After Mother, she quoted from the beginning of her book: ‘As long as you can love, love,’ and hoped that they would think more deeply about ‘what their mothers have done for them’.
Shin was visibly moved after winning the prize, and began her speech by joking that she wanted to tell us a story, but wasn’t a very good storyteller. She spoke about the power of stories to give people strength and to remind them that, in the end, life is beautiful.
The Man Asian Literary Prize was founded in Hong Kong in 2007, to commend Asian fiction written in or translated into English during the previous calendar year. The award represents 35 Asian countries, which span the continent from Iran to Japan.
This year’s shortlist is the strongest yet, which is the result of an overhaul of the prize in 2010. Originally, the Man Asian accepted only unpublished manuscripts, but it now requires the submission of novels already published in English. Shin has won US$30,000, with US$5000 going to the translator.
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