2023 Taipei International Book Exhibition Grand Prize
Fiction Award Winners List
| Author | Book Title | Publisher |
|---|---|---|
| Chu Yu-hsun | 《The Testimony Wil Be Denied》 | Locus Publishing Company |
| Leung Lee-chi | 《Routine Movement》 | ECUS Publishing House |
《STILL LIFE IN WHITE》
Publisher：INK Literary Monthly Publishing Co., Ltd
May 19, 1949, the declaration of martial law in Taiwan initiates the White Terror – nearly four decades of intense surveillance, disappearances, and political oppression targeting local Taiwanese resistance to Chiang Kai-shek’s authoritarian rule. Yet, even in this era of political menace, life goes on.…
A public school teacher with training in political warfare, Mr. Soo approaches everything with circumspection. Never one to rock the boat, he works to maintain political rectitude and counter-intelligence security at the school where he teaches. But above all, Mr. Soo hopes to provide his family with a better life during uncertain times.
Bun-hui has spent her life serving others. First the Japanese, then the mainlanders who arrived with Chiang Kai-shek, and now an elite local family. Times may change, but Bun-hui holds fast to the propriety that makes a good housekeeper; even as her employer is swept up in a dangerous political investigation, she refuses to air the faintest whiff of dirty laundry.
Miss Cassie is the daughter of local Taiwanese family with a fading aristocratic pedigree. In keeping with her class mores, she has chosen to study abroad in Paris, but her distance from Taiwan may not be enough to save her from suspicion when martial law is declared back home.
In the thirty years since the lifting of martial law, stories of the brutal indignities of the White Terror have gradually emerged. However, this collection of novellas stands out from other literary treatments of the period by foregoing the heart-wrenching cruelties and injustices in favor of unsentimental sketches of the struggle to maintain normalcy – the simple dreams, principles, and pursuits of ordinary life – in times of political repression.
Lai Hsiang Yin
Rights Contact：Jade Chen
E-mail：jadefish0221@gmail.com
W x H cm/pages/price：14.8×21 cm/272/NT$360
ISBN：9789863875079
《The Attorney From Bachimen》
Publisher：Mirror Fiction Inc.
* 2020 Mirror Fiction Million Dollar Award winner
* Television adaptation directed by the author is in production
A young Indigenous Taiwanese escapes the hard life of his fishing port hometown by becoming a public defense lawyer, but when an immigrant fisherman kills a boat captain from his tribe, he is forced to reevaluate his vision of justice.
______________
In 1950s Taiwan, large numbers of Amei tribesmen from the east coast moved north to work on fishing boats based in the port of Bachimen. Raised in these environs, Tung Pao-Chu watched his elders struggling to make ends meet as fishermen and decided he would pursue a different path. Through hard work he managed to leave Bachimen and fulfill his dream of becoming a public defense lawyer, defending accused criminals for a modest government salary.
Now, just as he is preparing to leave the public defender’s office to pursue more lucrative work, Tung Pao-Chu is assigned a difficult case involving the murder of an Amei boat captain and his entire family. The suspect is an illegal immigrant from Indonesia who worked on the victim’s boat. The brutality of the murders, combined with associated racial tensions, has thrust the case into the spotlight. Already in the difficult position of defending a man suspected of murdering his own tribesmen, Tung Pao-Chu begins to doubt whether the case is as simple as it seems. What was the motive for the murders? And what transpired on the fishing boat during its final voyage?
Through the lens of an apparently straightforward murder case, Port of Lies exposes the complexity of race relations in contemporary Taiwan. The novel addresses a broad range of issues from the death penalty, to conflicting profit motives in the fishing industry, to racial identity and affirmative action, to the rights of immigrant workers. From these intersecting threads author and lawyer Freddy Fu-Jui Tang weaves a fast-paced courtroom thriller destined to please crime and mystery fans with a taste for social realism.
Freddy Fu-Jui Tang
Rights Contact：Brian Chen
E-mail：chinesesun0907@mirrormedia.mg
W x H cm/pages/price：14.8×21 cm/456/NT$430
ISBN：9786267054055
《Perhaps in the somke》
Publisher：ECUS publishing house
Perhaps in the Smoke writes about the lives of ordinary people in Hong Kong after the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement in 2019 and the passage of the National Security Law in 2020. The youngest recipient of the Taipei International Book Exhibition Award, Page Fung Bak Kui is a Hong Kong writer born in the 1990s with a unique writing style. He now lives in Taiwan. Departing from his personal experience, Perhaps in the Smoke takes a darkly humorous look at totalitarianism to reflect on the possibilities of freedom in the midst of endless political oppression.
Page Fung Bak Kui
Rights Contact：Steven Ho
E-mail：ohyalong@bookrep.com.tw
W x H cm/pages/price：14.8×21 cm/240/NT330
ISBN：9786263140707
《The Testimony Wil Be Denied》
Publisher：Locus Publishing Company
The Testimonies Will Be Denied is comprised of five short stories centering on a war in the Taiwan Strait. In the not-so-distant future—the year 2047—China’s domestic issues lead it to launch a surprise invasion of Taiwan. Twenty years after the war ended, an academic specializing wartime memory, struck by the immense differences in the memories of his peers who experienced the war in their youths, begins collecting testimony from people who lived through the war. He gathers large volumes of historic materials not found on the record, seeking to explore the faces of the war outside the official narrative and record the facts that will be officially denied. Five stories, each employing distinct narrative styles, emerge from the testimonies.
The Testimonies Will Be Denied provides a kaleidoscopic view of the author’s conception of a war in the Taiwan Strait with its variety of viewpoint characters: fifth columnists colluding with the enemy. special forces within the PLA, youths suffering from PTSD, intelligence officers on both sides of the conflict, and members of civil defense forces. The multitude of voices paint a rich and diverse picture of the war.
Chu Yu-hsun
Rights Contact：Vinelle Pan
E-mail：vinelle@locuspublishing.com
W x H cm/pages/price：14×20 cm/272/NT$380
ISBN：9786267118955
《Routine Movement》
Publisher：ECUS Publishing House
Routine Movement is a new work of fiction by 2020 Hong Kong Young Artist in Literary Arts Award winner, Lee-chi Leung.
A mass social movement’s many small collisions with the routines of everyday life is the theme for the ten, interlinking stories of this novel, intended as both a reconstruction and record of the 2019 Hong Kong pro-democracy movement. Each chapter deftly weaves the ordinary objects and details of daily life into these stories of Hongkongers who must grapple with the new, everyday reality of the protests. Different perspectives, emotional viewpoints, and beliefs are masterfully explored, along with the personal trauma, loss, and despair of the various characters as they pursue their ideals. In the movement’s aftermath, wounds are covered up and recent events no longer talked about. Fellow protestors in masks and clothed in black; pink scars inscribed on skin; the smell of tear gas lingering in the city’s streets—the movement changed the basic rhythm of their lives, and yet life went on, all of them pretending everything was fine.
The novel’s final pages conclude on a note of hope, but the story remains far from over. In real life and resistance movements, there is never truly an end.
Leung Lee-chi
Rights Contact：Steven Ho
E-mail：ohyalong@bookrep.com.tw
W x H cm/pages/price：14.8×21 cm/408/NT380
ISBN：9786263140707
