Maria begins her journey....

So there, I'm back. With some good news, to boot. The reason why I wasn't here has now brought me back.

Polishing the final draft of MARIA'S ROOM for the Man Asian Literary Prize kept me away.

Now they've announced that Maria's in the race. We'll know her fate come October.

Until then it's a crazy fantasy trip for Penguin (Puffin, actually), a set of stories linked by this weird half-monster character (whose name I'll only disclose later). That has to be sent in by January. Another deadline is for a play that has lots of emotion and lots of dance (Bharathanatyam). Each work as different from the other as imagineable.

Here's an excerpt from the Man Asian website.


Hong Kong, 20 July 2007 – The Administrative Committee for the 2007 Man Asian Literary Prize
has today announced the longlist of works for this inaugural prize :

Tulsi Badrinath, The Living God
Sanjay Bahadur, The Sound Of Water
Kankana Basu, Cappuccino Dusk
Sanjiv Bhatla, Injustice
Shahbano Bilgrami, Without Dreams
Saikat Chakraborty, The Amnesiac
Jose Dalisay Jr., Soledad's Sister
Reeti Gadekar, Families at Home
Xiaolu Guo, 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth
Ameena Hussein, The Moon in the Water
Nu Nu Yi Inwa, Smile As They Bow
Jiang Rong, Wolf Totem
Hitomi Kanehara, Autofiction
N S Madhavan, Litanies of Dutch Battery
Laxmi Narayan Mishra, The Little God
Mo Yan, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out
Nalini Rajan, The Pangolin's Tale
Chiew-Siah Tei, Little Hut of Leaping Fishes
Shreekumar Varma, Maria's Room
Anuradha Vijayakrishnan, Seeing The Girl
Sujatha Vijayaraghavan, Pichaikuppan
Xu Xi, Habit of a Foreign Sky
Egoyan Zheng, Fleeting Light

This longlist of 23 unpublished works of Asian fiction in English will be reviewed and evaluated by the 2007 ManAsian Literary Prize judges, who will announce a shortlist of works in October 2007. The winner will be announcedon Saturday, 10 November at an awards ceremony in Hong Kong.

The judging panel for the 2007 Man Asian Literary Prize is: Adrienne Clarkson, former Governor General ofCanada (Chair); André Aciman, New York-based author and scholar, and Nicholas Jose, writer, scholar and formerCultural Counsellor at the Australian Embassy in China.

The 2007 Man Asian Literary Prize longlist was chosen from among 243 submissions received from all over Asia.Approximately two thirds of the submissions came from South Asia ; the largest single group of submissions wasfrom India. The rest came from throughout East Asia. The Prize received submissions from well-established aswell as first-time authors, and entries included translated works as well as works originally in English.

[Some of the news reports that have appeared about the Long List talk about 23 Asians being selected, of which 11 are Indians--- I've counted 12!]