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Programme looking at new fiction and non-fiction books

Programme looking at new fiction and non-fiction books, talking to authors and publishers and unearthing lost classics

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Open Book: Chinese literature - viewing this emerging superpower through its novels

20/01/2013

Chinese literature - viewing this emerging superpower through its novels

BBC Radio 4 - Open Book, Chinese literature - viewing this emerging superpower through its novels

Mariella Frostrup on Chinese literature, Eleanor Updale and a good time for debut novels.

Mariella Frostrup discusses Chinese literature and how we can view this emerging superpower through its novels. Plus, Eleanor Updale on telling a story in the space of one minute.

In October the Nobel prize for Literature was awarded to Mo Yan, the pen name of the Chinese novelist Guan Moye. Mo Yan translates as 'Don't speak' , a warning given to him by his parents during the Cultural Revolution. His latest novel translated into English, Pow!, is set in Slaughterhouse village and tells the story of a rural community obsessed with meat and the deadly extent they will go to in order to maximise a profit in animal flesh. Mo Yan's translator Howard Goldblatt and novelist and film maker Xiaolu Guo discuss the nature of Chinese literature and how much Mo Yan and his fellow contemporary Chinese novelists can teach us about life inside this emerging world force.In the imaginary town of Heathwick a series of bombs are about to explode killing, maiming and destroying lives among the residents. However it's not the aftermath of these cataclysmic events that Eleanor Updale, the acclaimed author of the Montmorency books for children explores, but the sixty seconds leading up to them. In her latest novel, The Last Minute, each chapter charts the passage of a mere second as we journey toward disaster with her doomed cast. As readers we're aware that a tragedy is going to strike, but not to whom or indeed the cause of the explosion to come.Literary critic Suzi Feay delves into the world of the debut novel and examines the latest Waterstones' 11 list of new fiction writers, how well their past predictions have done and why she feels now is a good time to be a debut novelist.Producer: Andrea Kidd.

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