By Ruth Finnegan

It is a common notion that Africa has, and indeed ought to have, learned much from the west. This is not wrong; all cultures rightly learn from each other. But less is said of what there is to learn from Africa: from her stories, myths, music, proverbs, insights – and more. Here an acclaimed African scholar steps into the gap by uncovering for us something of the great legacy of African thought and practice in ways that will astonish many. Written with verve and authority and directed above all to students and sixth formers, this book will also delight and often surprise those who know something of Africa as well as those hitherto ignorant.

Ruth Finnegan OBE FBA is Emeritus Professor The Open University, Foreign Associate of the Finnish Literature Bureau, and International Fellow of the American Folklore Society. An anthropologist and multi-award author, she has published extensively, chiefly on Africa, musical practice, and English urban life. Recent books include How is Language?, Fiji’s Music: Where Did It Come From?, her edited Entrancement: The Consciousness of Dreaming, Music and The World, and two prize-winning Africa-influenced novels Black Inked Pearl and Voyage of Pearl of the Seas.

By Lin Man-Chiu

Translated by Helen Wang (Winner 2017 Marsh Award)

The Ventriloquist’s Daughter – Between Fantasy and Reality, by Lin Man-chiu (Global Literature in Libraries Initiative blog)

An Australian woman, burdened by the original sin of her Caucasian ancestors, and a Taiwanese woman, haunted by the memories of 100 years of conflict in her homeland, meet as backpackers while travelling in South Korea. As they live and travel together, two women in flight, one from the East and the other from the West, struggle to find a way out of their personal dilemmas.

“Masked Dolls is one of those rare books which after reading reveals itself to be greater than the sum of its parts. Brutal, intense, fascinating.” — The Writes of Woman

“Set in turn-of-the-century Seoul and Taipei, Shih Chiung-yu’s novel depicts what it means to be a woman reconciling the scars of a tortured past with living in a globalized era.” — The Taipei Times

By Roger Pulvers

London Launch Event, 19th Feb 2018, Daiwa Foundation Japan House

‘Liv’: The truth of war in a pair of cornflower-blue eyes – Japan Times

“Liv is a gripping mystery, of a present haunted by the past, but also a profoundly moral book, asking of the reader: what would you do? In this, Liv deserves comparison with novels as great as An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro and The Reader by Bernhard Schlink.” — David Peace, author of Tokyo Year Zero.

Winner of English Pen Award

2016 Financial Times Emerging Voices Fiction Awards Longlist (Special Report)

Yang Tianyi is a “leftover woman” and under pressure to find a husband. She is attractive and intelligent but knows little of the world, and finally makes a disastrous marriage to a man, Wang Lian. At the end of the 1980s, in Tiananmen Square, she meets her love Hua Zheng again. However, after the political turmoil, Hua Zheng is framed as one of the perpetrators of the disturbances, and is sentenced to prison. Set against the background of China’s turbulent 1980s and 1990s, Crystal Wedding is a novel of searing emotional honesty.

Amid a Sea of Red Flags: Xu Xiaobin on her life-long relationship with literature: featured in ENGLISH PEN ATLAS

Crystal Wedding Preface by the Author

Snow – a short story by Xu Xiaobin (Read Paper Republic Week 41)

Xu Xiaobin and Nicky Harman in Conversation (Wednesday 20th April 2016, University of Leeds)

“A most wonderful, unsparing and uplifting book, not one ever to forget.” – Ruth Finnegan FBA (Emeritus Professor, Open University)

“This is a powerful and sensitively constructed novel about a literary woman’s search for a fulfilling love against the background of the Tian’anmen tragedy and its aftermath.” – Laifong Leung (Emeritus Professor, University of Alberta)