Ethnic ChinaLit

The 10th Junma Ethnic Literary Awards (骏马奖) have been announced. Open to works published in the PRC during 2008-11 by members of ethnic groups other than the majority Han, the competition is a politically correct affair co-organized—predictably—by the state-sponsored Chinese Writers Association, which claims more than 1,000 non-Han writers among its 8,000+ members, and the State Ethnic Affairs Commission. One of the judges is the omnipresent Li Jingze, editor-in-chief of People’s Literature (人民文学) and the new quarterly of Chinese literature in translation, Pathway (路灯), and also a long-time judge for China’s most prestigious literary competition, the Mao Dun Literature Prize (矛盾文学奖).

Here’s the list of the winners:

The Tibetan literary magazine <仁卓>, founded in June 2011, has just released its second issue comprising 80 poems selected from 40 publications. Edited by 尖·梅达 and日岗林 (pictured below), the magazine is published by Huang Nan Zhou Publishing (黄南州报社) located in a traditionally Tibetan region of Qinghai Province.

“仁卓” (“rangdrol,” Tibetan for “self-liberated”) is the pen name of Don-grub-rgyal (དོན་འགྲུབ་རྒྱལ་ ,  or  端智嘉 in Chinese) a celebrated Tibetan poet—considered by some as the founder of modern Tibetan literature—who suicided at just 32. His work can be purchased in Tibetan here.

Event: Poetry reading by Xi Chuan and translator Lucas Klein

Date/Venue: May 10 Thursday, 19:30 pm at the Beijing Bookworm

Notes: Xi Chuan (西川) is an acclaimed poet, essayist, and translator. His poetry has been widely anthologized, and he has received numerous prizes and honors including the Modern Chinese Poetry Award (1994), the national Lu Xun Prize for Literature (2001), the Zhuang Zhongwen Prize for Literature (2003). His collection, Notes on the Mosquito (New Directions, 2012),  has recently been translated by Lucas Klein of City University Hong Kong.