TGT Correspondent
Nov 7
Bangladeshi novelist Shaheen Akhtar has won the 3rd Asian Literature Award for her 2004 novel Talash. According to The Dhaka Tribune, the award was announced on the closing day of the Asia Literature Festival, held from October 29 to November 1 in Gwangju, South Korea.
Talash depicts the lasting suffering of women who had survived sexual violence during the liberation war of Bangladesh in 1971. It won the Prothom Alo Literary Prize in 2004. In 2012 its English translation The Search was published. It was translated into Korean by Professor Seung Hee Jeon and Farhana Shashi, and published in 2018.
29 Asian writers took part in the third edition of the Asian Literature Award, including Man Booker winner Han Kang. Akhtar was picked as winner from among other finalists, including Chinese writer Chi Zijian’s two novels The Last Quarter of the Moon and Mountain Summits, and Taiwanese writer Chu Tien-wen’s novel Notes of a Desolate Man.
Sponsored by the Asia Cultural Center (ACC), the Asian Literature Award was established in 2017 to highlight the aesthetic values of Asian literature, which have often been judged and misrepresented through Western literary lens. The award comes with a prize of 20 million won (around $17,500) and an adaptation of the work as a performance piece to be presented at the next festival.