CHINA: A publicity-shy Chinese author who published his book anonymously has won Asia's first major literary prize for a best-selling novel that blends philosophy, arcane history about gods and ruling dynasties and messages about learning from the wolf.
The €7,000 prize was launched by Man, the backers of the Booker prize, and is aimed at giving a greater global voice to the continent's writers who have lacked a platform.
Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem is set on the desolate grasslands of inner Mongolia and tells the tale of nomads and settlers and their relation with wolves. It is based on Jiang's personal experiences during the tumultuous period of Chinese history known as the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).
The novel, which is due to be published by Penguin China in March, has sold millions in China, mostly in pirate copies, and is interpreted variously as a call for more national pride, a business guide, an ecological tract or military strategy. The core message is that Chinese people must learn from the wolves of the steppes.
"I spent 30 years thinking and six years writing Wolf Totem, and my only hope was to produce an appealing story," said Jiang (62), a lecturer at a Beijing university.
Like many other Communist intellectuals, during the Cultural Revolution he went to the countryside - in his case to the Gobi in 1967, where he came very close to the packs of wolves which roam the wide grasslands there.
Adrienne Clarkson, a Chinese Canadian and former governor general of Canada, who chaired the judging panel, said: "A panoramic novel of life on the Mongolian grasslands during the Cultural Revolution, this masterly work is also a passionate argument about the complex inter-relationship between nomads and settlers, animals and human beings, nature and culture.
"The slowly developing narrative is rendered in vivid detail and has a powerful cumulative effect. A book like no other. Memorable."
In the late 1960s, local Mongolian farmers still led a nomadic lifestyle, roaming the steppes with their sheep and cows, in harmony with nature. They both loved and hated the wolves, which would attack them and their livestock, but were also their objects of worship.
The hero of the book, Chen Zhen, is forced to fight the wolves to protect his life. He sees a group of women and children fighting off a giant wolf trying to steal their sheep. He adopts a wolf cub and he learns a lot about the true nature of the wolf from it and he also achieves spiritual inspiration from Mongolian religious rituals based around the wolf.
"Chen" - in reality, Jiang - returned to Beijing in 1978 but he only decided to write the book much later. The author argues that the wolf's tactics were adopted by the armies of the 13th-century Mongol hordes, led by Genghis Khan, whose armies conquered a huge part of Asia and Europe, getting as far as Vienna.
Jiang was chosen from a quintet of shortlisted authors who are relative unknowns outside their home countries. The others were Burmese author Nu Nu Yi Inwa, Hong Kong's Xu Xi, Jose Dalisay jnr of the Philippines and Reeti Gadekar from India.