Asian Literature

• East Asian Literature


  • Chinese
  • Japanese
  • Korean
• Central Asian Literature


  • Bengali
  • Indian
  • Pakistani
  • Tamil
• West Asian Literature


  • Arabic
  • Persian
  • Turkish
• Southeast Asian Literature


  • Philippine
• Miguel Syjuco (Philippines)


  • Filipino writer from Manila
  • Grand prize winner of 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize for his novel Ilustrado
  • Ilustrado - with light shading of New York noir and American thriller; tells the story of a young writer's apprentice tasked with the self-appointed mission of writing an account of his deceased master's life. The action that follows takes readers on a journey of metacriticism, which does well to entertain while asking some serious questions about the state of Filipino literature as a whole
• Bi FeiYu (China)


  • Works are known for their complex portrayal of the "female psyche"
  • Some of the highest literary awards in China
  • Also wrote the screenplay for Zhang Yimou's 1996 film Shanghai Triad
  • Three Sisters - an intense and invigorating examination of personality and rampant individualism that's set in the context of high-Communist China in the years of the Cultural Revolution, does well to draw its readers in with a plethora of storylines that touch on vice, sex, Machiavellian power plays and contemporary politics all at the same time. With its focus on female characters and their interactions with male patriarchs in the China all around them, the book continues in the same vein as Feiyu's other feminist works, while its general success was galvanized in 2010, when it garnered the prestigious Man Booker Prize for Asian Literature
• Shin Kyung Sook (South Korea)


  • Became the first Korean writer to win the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012 for her novel Please Look After Mother
  • Amongst the most highly regarded contemporary writers
  • Has won major literary prizes including the Manhae Literature Prize, the Dong-In Literary Award and the Yi Sang Literary Prize
  • Prose is especially prized for its focus on exploring the psychological depths of the human mind
  • Please Look After Mother - driven by the guilt of those closest to 'Mother', the saintly, sacrificial old woman who has gone missing in the center of Seoul. Alternating in perspective, from first to second to third person, the novel veers from near accusatory to reflective and explores themes of family in the midst of South Korea's rapid urbanization and modernization of the past decade
• Govind Vinayak Karandikar (India)


  • Better known as Vinda
  • Indian poet, writer, literary critic and translator of Marathi language
  • Writer of The Wheel
• Yosuke Tanaka (Japan)


  • Born in Tokyo in 1969
  • Debuted in Eureka at the age of 19
  • Has written poems with stylistic diversity and unique sense of humor
  • Wrote A Day When the Mountains are Visible and Sweet Ultramarine Dreams
  • Has emerged as the new poetic sensitivity in Japan, and is sure to remain one of the most important figures in 21st – century Japanese poetry
• Haruki Murakami (Japan)


  • A famous Japanese author whose works have been translated into several languages
  • Not only arguably the most experimental Japanese novelist to have been translated into English, but is also the most popular, with sales in the millions worldwide
  • Now the most widely-read Japanese novelist of his generation; he has won virtually every prize in Japan has to offer, including its greatest, the "Yomiuri Literary Prize"
• Literary Genres


  • Haiku
  • Science Fiction
  • Folklore
• Haiku


  • Unrhymed poetic form consisting of 17 syllables arranged in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables respectively
  • First emerged in Japanese literature during the 17th century, as a terse reaction to elaborate poetic traditions, though it did not become known by the name haiku until the 19th century
  • A nature poem which revolves around seasons and nature
• Science Fiction


  • A genre of speculative fiction that contains imagined elements that don't exist in the real world
  • Spans a wide range of themes that often explore time travel, space travel, are set in the future, and deal with the consequences of technological and scientific advances
  • Ramayana (5th to 4th century BC) - includes Vimana flying machines able to travel into space or under water, and destroy entire cities using advanced weapons
  • Rigveda collection of Sanskrit hymns (1700–1100 BC) - "mechanical birds" that are seen "jumping into space speedily with a craft using fire and water
• Folklore


  • Expressive body of culture shared by a particular group of people; it encompasses the traditions common to that culture, subculture or group
  • Include oral traditions such as tales, proverbs and jokes
  • Folk Songs: epics (Shishi), and narrative poems (Xushishi) similar to long ballads or lyrical fairy tales
  • Wedding songs (kujiage), drinking songs (jiuge), love songs (quingge), and work songs (laodongge
  • Spoken narratives such as folktales (minjiangushi), myths (shenhua), legends (chuanshuo), animal tales (dongwugushi) and many more different styles of stories