Davidar's Recipe for Success

I really enjoyed interviewing David Davidar in Singapore recently. (The piece appears today in Starmag's Reads Monthly supplement.)

The interview just turned into a lovely chat about books with someone who shares the same tastes ... although it did rather boggle the mind to think that he is the guy who had actually formed those tastes in me because he had published many of the authors - including Vikram Seth, Rohinton Mistry, Arundahati Roy, Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro, Hisham Matar, and Rattawat Lapcharonsaep - that I love most.

But Davidar won't take the credit for having actually discovering any of the names he's published:

Sure, there’re all these horror stories of neglected geniuses and so on, but they’re exaggerated. ... There are some very good publishers in the world and if there’s a great book, it will be published, it will be noticed. So I can’t claim to have discovered them, it would have happened regardless. ... All you can do is provide an opportunity to get their work out to a readership. And if it isn’t you publishing the work, it would be somebody else, if one is being absolutely honest.

And he gives a piece of advice local publishers could do well to heed - if you want to succeed, you need to build a quality list of authors and not compromise on that quality:

Writers like to keep company, they don’t want to be published in a list that is mediocre or not ‘quite there’. Your imprint is only as good as the writers it publishes. ... And you have to be consistent, and you have to keep finding new talent to add to the list. That I think is something that distinguishes some publishers from the rest.

He reckons too that it doesn't matter where in the world you live or where you're from:

Today there are writers from all over the world, Somalia, Thailand Botswana – the world is hungry for stories, you know. It doesn’t matter what the author’s nationality, race or religion is. ... And all you need is talent, and the discipline to produce good work and you’ll find publishers wherever you are.

He also talked to me about the writing of his new novel, The Solitude of Emperors, which he described as is a very personal search for answers about one of the most pressing issues of our time - the misuse of religion.

(Shakeel Abidi reviews both Davidar novels in the supplement but it's a great pity he does not have space to explore the broader issues in Solitude which is very much that old fashioned thing - a novel of ideas, and yes, an idealistic enterprise.)

Davidar's humility and sincerity and ... just general niceness impressed me. Our tea-time chat to the background of Chritmas carols in the hotel lobby went on long after the tape recorder was switched off (this really is the perk of the job!). And it was also really nice to have a chance to chat to his colleague Jo Lusby of Penguin China who put to rest for me that horrid rumour that Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem has been held back from publication just so that it could be entered for the Man Asian Prize. For the record it was due to internal snarl-ups in the company - the book was "orphaned" twice when employees left the company.

Man Asian Teething Problems

Starmag invited Nury Vittachi to write about the Man Asian prize and I think he has done a great job of filling in the background for readers and waving the flag of encouragment for Asian writers.

He also highlights some of the teething problems the prize has faced:

Getting the funds and the green light from Man Group Plc took several years. Internal boardroom battles among the organisers changed the leadership of the prize, leaving a widespread feeling that it had become controlled by Western expatriates.

There is continuing controversy over the choice of countries allowed to submit. Malaysia was accidentally omitted, but then reinstated. Other countries, such as Mongolia, are still missing from the list.

(The omission of Malaysia from the list was a small hiccup, rectified in hours; the omission of Mongolia much more serious.)

And then there is the new controversy that has sprung up since the announcement of the winner:

Critics have pointed out that while the prize was intended for authors unpublished in the West, the organisers actually handed it to a wildly successful and very wealthy writer who already has massive publishing contracts around the world.

“Jiang Rong is quite possibly the very last author in Asia who needs what the prize offers,” said an academic at the unofficial support website, themanasianliteraryprize.com. Another online literary commentator, The Literary Saloon said the prize “was created in order to facilitate publishing and translation of Asian literature in and into English – so, of course, the first time they hand out the award, they give it to the one title that has already gotten heaps of international press and been sold for large advances!”

The book has already sold two million copies ... and there's the possiblity that penguin deliberately held back the publication of the English edition of the book so that it could be entered for the prize.

One anonymous commenter on the letter page of the Man Asian Literary Prize site (the unofficial one) says:

Jiang Rong's book was purchased by Penguin in 2005 and translation work started afterwards with the book scheduled to be published in English on the Penguin 2007 list. However it was delayed until March 2008 thus becoming eligible under a technicality to be entered for this this prize for unpublished works. You can check with contacts at Penguin.

But of course, the judges can only chose the best of the novels in front of them, and even if Penguin did manipulate their timing of events, they certainly did nothing illegal.

I guess the mechanics of the award will be closely scrutinised for the future. But anyway, what is a literary prize without a little controversy?

Worth reading on the aftermath of the prize is the very well written piece by an "UK academic specializing in Asian Studies" quoted in Nury's article.

Nice of Nury by the way to mention my blog:

... one of the liveliest discussion venues in Asia for debate about the prize.

(Ahem!)

and the controversy we stirred about the Asian story arc thing. I am not finished with the topic yet (at least in my own head if not on the blog) and won't be for a while!

But it is so nice to feel that there is a wider discussion going on about Asian writing and how to grow and encourage it. I'm really glad Nury agreed to write for us and hope he will do so again.

There's also a very good review by Janet Tay of The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold. Must read this.

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.