Novel of Mongolian Grasslands Wins Man Asian

Congrats to Jiang Rong, winner of the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize.

Adrienne Clarkson, Chair of the judges described his Wolf Totem as :

A panoramic novel of life on the Mongolian grasslands during the Cultural Revolution, this masterly work is also a passionate argument about the complex interrelationship between nomads and settlers, animals and human beings, nature and culture. The slowly developing narrative is rendered in vivid detail and has a powerful cumulative effect. A book like no other. Memorable.

The novel is semi-autobiographical and written under a pseudonym: the author's true identity is not publicly known.

This about him from the Man Asian website:

Jiang Rong was born in Jiangsu, southern China, in 1946, and graduated from the middle school attached to China Art College in 1966. In 1967, Jiang joined the first wave of intellectuals who moved to the countryside as volunteers, living with nomadic communities on the Chinese border of Inner and Outer Mongolia for 11 years. Following his return to Beijing in 1978, Jiang embarked on postgraduate studies in political science at the renowned Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and assumed an academic position at a Beijing university. Now retired, he lives in Beijing, with his wife.

He wins US$10,000, while his translator wins US3,000.

Update:

The Guardian has a very good piece on the book and names the author as Lu Jiamin. The book has already been a publishing sensation in China where:

...it has sold two million legal copies, along with an estimated 10 times that number of pirated books. It has been the subject of literary debates, management motivation courses and military training lectures.

Postscript:

Here's an interview with Jiang Rong from the Guardian.