Organizers of the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize released its nominee list Sunday, featuring 12 writers from Iran, Japan, China, India, Pakistan, South Korea and Bangladesh. The final winner will be announced in March.
Dowlatabadi was nominated for his novel The Colonel, which is set on a pitch black, rainy night in a small Iranian town. Inside his house the colonel is immersed in thought. Memories are storming in, including memories of his children, who had joined different factions in the 1979 revolution. There is a knock on the door. Two young policemen have come to summon the colonel to collect the body of his youngest daughter as the revolution devours its own children. The novel is a critique of the failures of the Iranian left over the last 50 years.
Born in 1940 in the Khorasan village of Dowlatabad, Dowlatabadi is perhaps the most prominent Iranian novelist since the 1980s. Self-educated and forced to work from childhood as a farm hand, Dowlatabadi went to Tehran later on to become an actor. He started writing in the 1960s and has published numerous novels, novellas, plays and essays. He is considered an important representative of modern Persian prose and has also written dozens of critical literary and political essays. Dowlatabadi combines the poetic tradition of his culture with the direct and unembellished everyday speech of the villages.
Founded in 2007, the Man Asian Literary Prize is an annual literary award given to the best novel by an Asian writer, either written in English or translated into English, and published in the previous calendar year. Novels that had been published many years ago and have been translated into an international language in 2011 can also join the competition.
Journalist Razia Iqbal will lead this year’s jury accompanied by Chang-rae Lee, the Korean-American Pulitzer-prize finalist and author of The Surrendered, and Vikas Swarup, author of Q&A that was filmed as the Oscar-winning movie Slumdog Millionaire.
The Man Asian Literary Prize, is sponsored by the Man Group, a London-based investment firm that dates itself back to 1783. Man Group sponsors such literary prizes as the Man Booker Prize, the Man Booker International Prize, the Lost Man Booker Prize and the Man Asian Literary Prize.
The winning book each year is awarded $30,000 to the author and an additional $5,000 to the translator, if there is one.