SINGAPORE – Singapore writer Lee Jing-Jing has been longlisted for the 2020 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction for her novel How We Disappeared.
Lee’s novel, which is about “comfort women” in World War II Singapore, made the British literary award’s list of 12 announced on Monday (March 9).
This comes less than a week after news that Lee’s book was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, a British award for female authors.
For the Walter Scott prize, her book will be up against titles including Joseph O’Connor’s Shadowplay, James Meek’s To Calais, in Ordinary Time and The Offing by Benjamin Myers, who had won the prize in 2018 for The Gallows Pole.
First awarded in 2010, the £25,000 prize is in its 11th year and open to books published in the previous year in the United Kingdom, Ireland or the Commonwealth and whose storyline mostly takes place at least 60 years ago.
The prize is sponsored by the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch who have distant family links with Scott, who is regarded as the creator of the historical fiction genre.
Previous winners include Malaysian writer Tan Twan Eng for The Garden Of Evening Mists (2013), English writer Hilary Mantel for Wolf Hall (2010) and English author Andrea Levy for The Long Song (2011).
The shortlist for this year will be announced in April and the winner will be announced at the Baillie Gifford Borders Book Festival in Scotland on June 12.
How We Disappeared, Lee’s international debut, follows Wang Di, an elderly cardboard collector who endured sexual slavery in a WWII Japanese military brothel as a teenager, and Kevin, a 12-year-old boy who is bullied at school and is trying to find a missing link from his family’s past.
Source: Read Full Article