– Hong Kong
South Korean author Kyung-sook Shin has become the first woman to win the Man Asian Literary Prize for her novel Please Look After Mother, which tells the story of a family’s heartbreaking search for their mum after she goes missing from a Seoul subway station.
During a black-tie dinner hosted at the Conrad hotel in Hong Kong, BBC Special Correspondent and chair of this year’s judging panel Razia Iqbal announced the winner of Asia’s most prestigious prize for literature.
She said the reason they chose Shin’s book is because it is “an amazing story”, beautifully written and poignantly told, through a compelling structure of different narrative voices.
Iqbal observed that It is at once an intimate portrait of a family’s search for their mother and an insight into Korea after the Korean War: ‘Looking through the microcosm of the family, [we see] how the country is moving into modernity, leaving behind its traditional rural ways of life.
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