HONG KONG (AFP) — Chinese author Jiang Rong used his personal experience of living in the Chinese-Mongolian border region during the Cultural Revolution to write his prize-winning novel "Wolf Totem."
Jiang, who scooped the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize Saturday, tells the story of remote countryside whose culture, tradition and environment are being damaged by modernisation.
The book is a fictional account of life in the 1970s. The retired academic lived with nomadic communities in the region for 11 years as part of the Communist Party's drive to encourage intellectuals to live among the rural poor, before returning to Beijing to study political science.
"Wolf Totem" tells the story of Beijing intellectual Chen Zhen, who volunteers to move to a remote nomadic settlement on the Chinese-Mongolian border and discovers a life of simplicity based on an eternal struggle between wolves and humans in their fight to survive.
But the balance between the wolves and humans is disrupted by people from the city, who bring modernity and a drive for productivity to the remote grasslands and in doing so damage the region.
Jiang beat four other shortlisted Asian writers to win the 10,000-dollar prize for his work and 3,000 dollars for the book's translator, Howard Goldblatt.
The award is for unpublished work from Asia either written in English or translated into English. It is backed by the company that sponsors the Booker prize.
The 61-year-old writer was absent from the award ceremony in Hong Kong due to ill health.
His prize was accepted on his behalf by Li Bo, the publisher of his original Chinese novel, and Jo Lusby of Penguin China, which will publish the English version in March 2008.
"My story of Mongolia?s wolves is the product of an ongoing study of the Inner Mongolian environment, and interpretation of the meanings behind the natural behaviour of animals," Jiang said in a letter read out by Li Bo.
"Through this story, I also reflect upon the nature of Chinese people. That such a Chinese story can come to the attention of the Man Asian Literary Prize is a great thing," he added.
Adrienne Clarkson, who led the judging panel, described Jiang's work "as 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," she said.
The Man Asian Literary Prize received more than 240 submissions from across Asia, from well-established as well as first-time authors.
The other nominees were "Smile As They Bow" by Myanmar's Nu Nu Yi Inwa, "Soledad's Sister" by Filipino author Jose Dalisay Jr., "Habit of a Foreign Sky" by Chinese-Indonesian writer Xu Xi and "Families at Home" by Indian writer Reeti Gadekar.
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