This week, our Editors-at-Large take us around the world for updates on literary events, awards, and initiatives. From a celebration of the 101st edition of a cornerstone in Bulgaria’s literary scene, to a deep dive into innovative literary prizes in China, and an introduction to the winner of the 2025 Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation—read on to learn more.
Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Bulgaria
Recently, I had the pleasure of attending a couple of literary events organized within the annual Пловдив чете (“Plovdiv Reads”) festival in my hometown. One of them was a discussion about the anniversary issue (the 101st, to be precise) of the Bulgarian magazine for literature and the humanities called Страница (“Page”).
The magazine, published every three months, was founded in 1997 in Plovdiv in collaboration with the local university St. Paisii Hilendarski. Throughout the years, it has provided a platform for a vast array of voices. In fact, almost all Bulgarian authors who have been active since and before Issue 1 have been present on its pages through their poetry, short stories, essays, criticism, memoirs, translations, interviews, and more. What truly separates it from other similar projects, however, is the dedicated literary criticism section and its yearly academic analysis of the development of Bulgarian literature over time, the directions it seems to have taken, and emerging trends in the Bulgarian literary scene.
During the event itself, three long-time members of the magazine’s editorial staff—Mladen Vlashki, Gergina Krasteva, and Boris Minkov—talked about their own experience and shared memories of its earlier days, as well as a few funny anecdotes from recent collaborations. They were unanimous that the main reason behind its success was the team’s inspiring perseverance and oneness. It should be noted that various prominent figures of the Bulgarian literary world, such as Svetlozar Igov, Ani Ilkov, Alexander Sekulov, Cleo Protohristova, Lyudmil Stanev, and Nedyalko Slavov, have played a key role in its longevity.
The event ended on a positive note about the future of the written word. The audience was cheerful and we all felt that the magazine’s readers, too, belong to its big family.
Hongyu Jasmine Zhu, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from China
Readers of Chinese literature are likely familiar with the Mao Dun Literature Prize (茅盾文学奖), one of China’s most prestigious awards for long-form fiction. In the past decade, independently funded prizes such as the Blancpain-Imaginist Literary Prize (宝珀理想国文学奖) and the One Way Street Book Award (单向街书店文学奖) have also risen to champion new voices and celebrate creativity across the literary production process. For many writers, however, these accolades remain out of reach—reserved for those already published, who have found a way in.
Now, as a wave of open calls ripples across China, I’m excited to share a few border-crossing literary initiatives that seek to lower the barrier to entry for emerging writers: by embracing the multiplicity of Chinese-language writers across geographies and identities, and by investing not only in talent but also in the slow, uncertain process of writing itself.
The Lijiang Literary Prize (漓江文学奖), now in its second year, made national headlines in May after a fiction writer’s acceptance speech went viral. While the inaugural year limited eligibility to works published in China, this year’s prize shifts focus entirely to unpublished Chinese-language manuscripts of fiction and nonfiction from anywhere in the world. A newly added category also offers China’s highest prize money for translated literature: 150,000 RMB for two winners, and 50,000 RMB for two finalists. As diasporic writing often circulates within separate ecosystems with limited institutional overlap, and as the creative labor of literary translators in China remains underrecognized and underpaid, I’m hopeful that the transformed criteria imagines an opening where “On The Road” (this year’s theme) becomes not just a metaphor for the migrant and marginal, but a call for new routes of literary belonging, recognition, and exchange.
If Lijiang looks outward across new geographies of recognition, a recent call for short-form women’s crime fiction, co-organized by Accent Society and Nowness, turns inward toward genre, voice, motive, and morality. Writers working from the margins, in both Chinese and English, are invited to participate. In a conversation moderated by Nowness, Wapi 何袜皮, anthropologist and curator of the true crime blog Myrrh Garden (没药花园), critiques how women in crime fiction have long been flattened into symbolic victims, calling instead for the full spectrum of women’s roles in crime narratives—let them be not just good or evil, but contradictory, wild, intelligent, fallible, and fully alive. Na Zhong 钟娜, writer and co-founder of Accent Society, furthers this by suggesting: “If we are to portray a more complex relationship between women and evil, one compelling angle is to rethink women’s relationship to goodness itself.” The two also discuss the violence and volatility of diasporic life and its radical narrative potential. Submissions are open until year’s end, with winning entries to be published next summer by Accent Edition in an anthology “of the women, for the women, by the women.”
伏笔计划 (Foreshadowing Project), organized by literary mook 鲤Newriting, offers a distinct model for literary competitions supporting emerging writers by funding selected novels-in-progress with 100,000 RMB each, plus opportunities for publication and media adaptation. In its inaugural run last year, 1,455 anonymous submissions were evaluated across three rounds based on sample chapters, an outline, and a concrete writing plan. Arguably an unprecedented move in literary transparency, the final deliberation—selecting three winners out of six shortlisted works—was broadcast live on 鲤Newriting’s WeChat channel. Every conversation, textual analysis, and moment of disagreement between judges Ge Fei 格非, Cao Baoping 曹保平, and Lu Nei 路内 were made public in real time. One of the winning writers, Saul 索耳, reflected: “Perhaps the meaning of a foreshadowing is this: you never know what lies latent in life, until the day your pen draws it to light.” With publication underway for the three winning novels, the second round of submissions is now open through November, for Chinese-language writers under 45.
Here’s to more institutional shifts, more room for risk and becoming, and boldness to reimagine what literary recognition can look like. Tell your friends too who read and/or write in Chinese! Perhaps, somewhere in the margins, the next story is already beginning.
Zohra Salih, Editor-at-Large, Reporting for India
If there is one book that I can say that I am dying to read—amongst an ever-increasing pile of exciting fiction in translation—it has to be Mehdi Khwaja’s translation of Akhtar Mohiuddin’s 1975 Kashmiri novel To Each Their Own Hell, which was recently announced as the winner of the 2025 Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation. This is momentous on many, many counts. The prize was founded in 2022 to highlight works from South Asia on an international platform, specifically to address “a glaring gap in the American publishing landscape. . . despite being spoken by more than a fifth of the world’s population, South Asian languages make up less than 1 percent of all translated literature published in the United States.”
Last year, it was awarded to Fortress of the Forgotten Ones written by Fatima Riaz and translated by Sana Chaudhry, forthcoming in March 2026. This year’s awardee holds the special honor of also being the first ever Kashmiri novel to be translated into English and published in the United States—a huge win for Kashmiri literature, which gets nowhere near the recognition it deserves in India.
To translate Akhtar Mohhiuddin’s works is a monumental task. The novelist, playwright, and short story writer was a colossus in Kashmiri literature, and wrote in both Urdu and Kashmiri, and penned the first Kashmiri-language novel—Dod Dag, or Disease and Pain. His Kashmiri short story Duniya te Afsane (The World and a Tale) was published in Asymptote’s Winter 2021 issue, translated by anthropologist and Daak co-founder Onaiza Drabu. In her note, Drabu mentions having grown up hearing of the writer’s name and that he has “remained surprisingly untranslated.” He was both a writer and a scholar, deeply respected amongst Kashmiris for his astute observations on the development of Kashmiri society and culture, contesting dominant narratives about the region’s past.
In addition to translating, Mehdi Khwaja is also a freelance journalist, editor, as well as a traditional craftsman, and has taught courses on Kashmiri language and literature at Ashoka University. In juror Daisy Rockwell’s words:
The 1975 Kashmiri novel To Each Their Own Hell by Akhtar Mohiuddin (1928–2001) is a taut, compelling meditation on love, and its absence, populated by mysterious characters with names like X and Sheen and Daisy and Nancy. In Mehdi Khwaja’s compelling translation, the propulsive voice of the narrative immediately grabs the reader’s attention and won’t let go. To Each Their Own Hell is utterly unique and evokes both the nihilism of No Exit or Madame Bovary and the ambiance of a noir thriller.
The book will be released in March 2027, and excerpts from the novel as well as the other finalists will be available to read on Words Without Borders in the coming months. Among these titles, Saigon Puducherry written by Nagarathinam Krishna and translated from Tamil by Subhashree Beeman was recognised with a Special Jury Mention.
*****
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