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Over 30 years ago, almost all of Taiwan’s picture books were translations from English and Japanese. There were very few local artists involved in the creation of picture books at the time, and if you walked into a bookstore it would have been difficult find a picture book featuring Taiwanese children. Under these circumstances, the Hsin Yi Foundation, which promotes reading in early childhood, established the Hsin Yi Picture Book Award in 1987 to encourage local creativity.

In 1988, the inaugural award was won by Let’s Get Mung Beans, Momma! Today, it is a classic Taiwanese picture book, and the Hsin Yi Picture Book Award has become the country’s most important prize for original picture books. By the award’s 31st year, a total of 145 prizes have been awarded, 90 original works have been published, and more than 30 titles have been published in other languages.

On My Way to Buy Eggs

They include the 13th prize-winner, On My Way to Buy Eggs, which was featured in Publishers Weekly’s Best Children’s Books of the Year. Guji Guji, which won the 15th prize, has been translated into 15 languages, it won the Peter Pan Award in Sweden and the English edition topped the New York Times bestseller list. Guji Guji tells the story of a crocodile who grows up with a family of ducks after his egg rolls into a duck nest. One day, three malicious crocodiles find him and try to convince him to eat some ducks with them. The story, which deals with issues such as adoption, love, and identity, has become popular in many countries. It is filled with many dramatic twists and turns, and has been adapted for the stage in Sweden, New Zealand and Spain.

Guji Guji

For over thirty years, the award-winning titles have covered a huge range of different childhood experiences. Let’s Get Mung Beans, Momma! includes the processes of growing mung beans, cooking mung bean soup and making mung bean popsicles, which are common childhood memories for Taiwanese people. The book has a succinct writing style, but alongside the meticulous illustrations, it captures the friendliness of the grocery store and everyday life as mother and child, adding plenty of details for children to look at. In the sixth prize-winner, Spit the Seeds, a piglet accidentally swallows papaya seeds and starts to worry that a tree will grow out of his head, but then he imagines small birds building nests in the tree and people cool-off in its shade, which shifts his mood and fills him with anticipation. This humorous way of thinking not only makes children laugh, but also conveys the most precious characteristic of childhood: the power of imagination.

Spit the Seeds

Similarly, many of the books explore the power of childhood imagination. In On My Way to Buy Eggs, a young girl looks at the world through a blue glass bead and imagines that she is a fish in the ocean, then later she has a make-believe game where she pretends to be her mother talking to a shopkeeper. As School Library Journal said, “This universal tribute to the power of a child’s imagination will strike a familiar chord with dreamers everywhere.” The 14th prize-winner, I Really Want to Eat a Durian, features a small mouse that has never eaten durian and really wants to know what it tastes like, so he goes around asking other animals about it, resulting in all the animals in the forest wanting to eat durian. The small mouse represents a child, and the string of words illustrated in the sky above him, “I want to eat durian”, reflect the unabashed innocence of children. The imaginative scenarios depicted in these books are all from the perspectives of young children and reflect the purpose of the Hsin Yi Picture Book Award. Interestingly, Thailand, which produces a lot of durian, was the first overseas country to publish I Really Want to Eat a Durian.

Some of the prize-winning works are demonstrations of local Taiwanese culture, such as the 27th winner, Little Peach, which tells the story of the Hakka rice cake; while in the winner of the 30th prize, A Busy New Year’s Eve, the adults are busily preparing for Chinese New Year, creating a fun atmosphere for children to learn about all kinds of New Year’s customs. The subject of the 20th winner, The Sword-Lion Who Lost His Sword, is a tradition from Tainan known as a sword-lion. With the blessing of his homeland, the sword-lion sets out to find the double-edged sword, but when it is nowhere to be found, the village residents ask the gods for a prophecy. The author incorporates folk beliefs into the highs and lows of the story, so that it is still enjoyable to read for children who aren’t familiar with the cultural background.

The Sword-Lion Who Lost His Sword

With time, we’ve also seen prize-winning works which have their fingers on the pulse of modern society. When stray dogs became a cause for concern in Taiwan, the 10th prize-winner, The Stray Dogs Around My House and I, featured a protagonist who took a different route to school to avoid stray dogs. The winner of the 20th prize, A Trip from the Zoo, has the animals tour Taipei by riding the subway; while in the 21st prize-winner, One Afternoon, the protagonist shows the reader around Taipei by bicycle; and Papa’s Red Umbrella, which also won the 21st prize, depicts sky lanterns in Pingxi. These works all portray a popular way of life in Taiwan today.

A Trip from the Zoo

Many of the winners have said that they started creating to participate in the prize, or that they compete in the prize every year. The award’s most significant achievement is that it has encouraged more people to create for children and supported many important creators of picture books, such as Chunlun Lee, Bei Lynn, Chen Chih-Yuan and Liu Hsu-Kung etc.

The Hsin Yi Picture Book Award has captured Taiwan’s landscape and culture, through words and illustrations in the form of picture books. These books not only give children a local culture they can identify with, but let children across the world enjoy their charming stories.

The Taiwanese market for illustrated children’s titles has long been dominated by works in translation, yet years of productive collaboration between content creators and editors has also resulted in a number of domestic titles that have garnered international attention. Kao Ming-Mei, Editorial Director of Pace Publishing, was kind enough to accept an interview with Books from Taiwan to talk about her experience working in the field.

        Pace Publishing boasts a strong list of domestic children’s titles to accompany their list of works in translation. Books from Taiwan featured two such Taiwanese titles, A Day in the Life of a Lighthouse and A Dinnertime Adventure, in Issues Six and Eight, respectively. Other domestic titles, like The Night Market and The ​Morning market, feature richly definitive aspects of Taiwanese culture.

        After graduating from university with a degree in Russian, Kao Ming-Mei traveled to Japan to pursue graduate study in psychology. She completed a one-year fellowship as a foreign researcher at the International Institute for Children’s Literature in Ōsaka, during which time she researched the development of illustrated children’s literature in Japan as well as the children’s literacy movement. Over the course of her thirty years in the industry, she founded and served as Editor-in-Chief for Bennesse magazine, been Editor-in-Chief for Hsin-Yi Publishing House, and judged several rounds of the Hsin-Yi Children’s Literature Award, all while translating over twenty titles from English and Japanese. She is currently Editorial Director for Pace Publishing, an imprint of Book Republic, and has overseen the production of many prize-winning titles.

BFT: Out of all the domestic children’s titles you’ve read since you were a kid, which has had the deepest impression on you? What have you been reading recently?

I think The Mouse Bride, published by Yuan-Liou in 1992, has left the deepest impression on my memory. The story is smoothly laid out, and the illustrations are very mature. It won a prize at the Catalonia Illustrator’s Fair that year. It’s a wonderful book.

More recently, Chih-Yuan Chen’s Missing You, and The Stone Buddha by Yang Wen-Cheng and Higo have attracted my attention.

What, to your practiced eye, seem to be the unique characteristics of Taiwanese children’s titles? Do you see new trends in content and style happening over the past few years.

Domestic children’s titles have themselves become an increasing trend lately; not only are their numbers growing, their range of content and style is also diversifying significantly, even moving from specifically local concerns to more universalized life experiences. I think part of the reason our authors and illustrators have so much creative energy, and show such willingness to try different things involves our democratized society an increasing number of chances to interact with the outside world. Of course, when compared to content creators in countries with mature children’s book markets, it still seems clear that ours still need more time to explore, learn, and discover their own style.

BFT: You’re a veteran of international book expositions, and are certainly very familiar with the process of international rights sales. When you are meeting with foreign publishers, are there aspects of being on the sell-side that we should understand and learn from?

We slowly learned how to sell rights through the process of buying them. We have already caught up on the technical side of things, like preparing English materials, employing useful pitch techniques during meetings, doing follow-up work, and so on. But these are merely preparatory tools; having good books and a proactive, positive attitude are still the key. Good books give the editor confidence to go into a meeting with her head held high and ready to talk at length. Obviously, whether or not you make the sale depends on the buyer’s requirements, so learning about the other side’s needs and interests is also very important.

BFT: Do you have any interesting stories from your experience interacting with foreign colleagues at meetings or when talking about Taiwanese children’s books?

Speaking from recent memory, I think I would have to note the widespread positive reaction Pace Publishing has gotten everywhere to A Day in the Life of a Lighthouse. The artist depicts a full day in a harbor in vivid, thorough illustrations of boats, dykes, and passersby that show masterful command of light and shade. The seascape at Keelung inspired the art, and even though the book has no text, the similarities between harbors all around the world means that having no words is no obstacle; the common language of images can cross any boundary.

Another story comes from 2001, when Hsin-Yi published Chen Chih-Yuan’s On My Way to Buy Eggs. It’s the story of a little girl called Shau-yu, who goes out to help her father run errands. The streets and alleys she walks through could be called extremely “Taiwan” – the iron-grated windows, the mopeds by the roadside, the sheet metal houses and telephone poles had us worried at first that the scene would be so highly localized that foreign audiences wouldn’t accept it. Yet the English translation was very well received, and even received a mention on Publishers’ Weekly as one of the best children’s books of 2003. Clearly, everyone can relate to a story of a young child wandering aimlessly through the streets alone, and even though the story is clearly set in Taiwan, it can still call up childhood memories for readers all over the world.

BFT: Looking through Pace’s catalogue, one can find everything from children’s stories to non-fiction manga. It seems like Pace is seriously interested in trying new topics, and bringing new reading experiences to the market. If you were to compare publishing domestic titles to publishing titles through translation, where do you find the greatest challenges, and the greatest enjoyment?

The greatest challenge lies in working with the creator to conceptualize and produce an illustrated title that “only we can make.” And I have the most fun working with the author on illustration placement and figuring out the flow of the story. It’s a process that requires good communication and frequent experimentation. Some creators come to the table with a completed story in mind, which they can then easily put onto paper. Yet the vast majority of creators will run into bottlenecks that can be eased with an editor’s help. Sometimes you have to get into it and feel the creator’s frustration, while other times you have to stand a little farther off, and just give him some time. I have to place myself on the high ground so I can alter the process according to the unique characteristics of each creator and each work. “Literature is the symbol of depression,” as Kuriyagawa Hakuson once said, and the creation of an illustrated book is often as tortuous a process as it is enchanting.

BFT: As a book lover and long-time industry veteran, what are your hopes for domestic children’s literature? Are there any new experiments you still want to try?

Pace Publishing’s commitment to trying new content and styles springs from a desire to advance with the times. Society is constantly changing, and we need to keep trying new things and altering our process if we wish to produce work that new generations of children will like. And behind this immutable decision to keep changing are two points of faith that have carried me through all thirty years in children’s book publishing. I believe in developing a child’s sense of the beautiful, and in planting the seeds of truth, goodness, and beauty in their heart. I personally feel that the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty are the greatest goals one can have in life, and that they provide meaning to our existence. Some may find children’s books to be fake, since such beautiful, pure environments can’t possibly exist in the “real world.” But I think that real-world imperfection is the very reason that we should help children assimilate these goals into their value systems as early as possible through literature, that they may become a source of strength as those children grow up. 

As regards my expectations for Taiwanese children’s literature, I hope that our content creators can continue to broaden their vision of the world, and make their stories more layered while still refining the visual artistic aspects of their craft.

BFT: Finally, are there any Taiwanese children’s illustrators or authors whom you’d like to introduce to the rest of the world?

Well, there are really too many of those – every book Pace publishes has my fullest confidence! If I absolutely had to pick one, I suppose I would recommend that everyone read Bei Lynn’s work. She commands a rich store of experience, and shows no fear of trying new things, yet she’s also powerfully self-aware, and can interpret and communicate new stimuli in her own language. She’s a creator who stays true to herself. She’s started to write poetry these past few years, and you can see the texts for her stories are always improving. For instance, if you take the text of Bubu the Frog Loves to Jump on its own and read it aloud, you’ll find a strong rhythm and resonance there. That makes it a new kind of illustrated story, and I really recommend you all read it.

While Taiwanese publishers still face many difficulties in the sale of international rights, healthy economic relationships with Japan, Korea, and the southeast Asian nations (such as Thailand and Vietnam), as well as clear channels across the Taiwan Strait have kept the industry doing fairly well.

Publishing information channels across the Taiwan Strait are plentiful and open. Taiwanese authors can manage their readers through the internet or direct visits, and can even sell yet-unpublished manuscripts directly to Chinese presses through their own publisher. The Chinese mainland has thereby become the easiest and most desirable sales target for book rights.

In recent years, Thailand has been very active at the Taipei Book Fair. Thai agents who can read Chinese have lowered the barriers of entry for Taiwanese publishers, and business grows steadily. Popular genres include genre fiction such as martial arts novels, romances, and ghost stories, a phenomenon directly related to the preferences of Thai readers. Nonfiction categories include illustrated nonfiction, health and nutrition, self-help, business management, and Chinese history – interestingly, the desire for Chinese history is directly motivated by computer games and education. Reputation is also a deciding factor in rights purchases. Examples include successful sales by Crown Publishing House of books by San Mao, Eileen Chang, Hou Wen-yung and others to Japan and Korea.

The Soji Shimada Mystery Prize, started by Crown in 2008, is also worth talking about. After over a decade of publishing mystery novels in translation, Crown came together with Soji Shimada, the widely-translated mystery novel writer to start a novel contest that would allow previously unknown winners to step directly onto an international stage, guaranteeing them sales to Japan, China, and Thailand (the third iteration of the Prize added Italy and Malaysia to that group; the prize is now in its fourth round).

Taiwanese publishers can learn from the example of Chan Ho-Kei, the Hong Kong author whose literary mystery novel The Borrowed won both the second Soji Shimada Prize and First Prize at the 2015 Taipei International Book Fair, has sold translation rights in seven countries as well as film rights to the book. the author is from Hong Kong and the story itself focuses on the Hong Kong police, The Borrowed was produced entirely by Crown. Although Hong Kong’s Occupy Central movement, which occurred just before the Frankfurt Book Fair, seemed to be the happy accident behind the book’s publicity, the real key lay in the Taiwanese agent’s willingness to invest 150,000 NTD to have the book professionally translated and edited. Advances and royalties together returned that investment more than thirty-three times over. The significance of that return is worthy of consideration.

Another notable work, which sold for over two million NTD, is the nonfiction work Wonderland. In 2015, coloring books took the publishing world by storm. Taiwan’s DelightPress, which had been publishing art therapy books for many years, saw the trend coming, and designed a coloring book themed on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Compared to The Secret Garden, the design and illustrations in Wonderland appealed strongly to 20-30-year-old female readers, and the book not only surpassed a highly competitive field, it found immediate interest among foreign publishers, as its images possessed a universal, independent appeal. Clearly, Taiwanese publishers are capable of creating original works of art that can surprise the world.

What is the next step for international rights sales in Taiwan? How should the publishing industry continue to develop? My own opinion is that domestic publishers should build closer ties with agents, in order to bring the possibility of international sales into the early stages of the creative process, and allow the agent, who has international connections and sales experience, to introduce the work strategically and effectively. Such a relationship would build a self-sustaining, positive energy, and produce ever more qualified publishing professionals.

There are any number of possible angles from which we can introduce and analyze the state of domestic publishing in Taiwan today. In this article, I will rely on my own concrete experience and observations as well as the results of interviews done with industry members to describe the current scene as I understand it, as well as offer my own expectations and suggestions.

Over the past twenty years, Taiwanese publishing has evolved away from an editor-centered model that privileged personal connections and individual artistry, toward a more standardized management model that aims to lower costs, increase revenue, and grasp market changes by actualizing the potential of the strategic business unit and controlling key performance indicators (KPI) throughout the production process using digital and network tools.

Major publishers and publishing groups maintain clear company structures, in which the editorial and strategy departments are the primary production units, while sales, accounting, administration, and legal counsel are considered logistical support. Small publishers with editorial teams of four people or fewer often require their editors to wear several different hats, yet the majority of resources are still redirected to editorial production. No matter how large or small the publisher, editors remain the “movers and shakers,” and are responsible for everything from topic selection, market positioning, design, and marketing to community management and after-sale advertisement. They also play a key role in rights sales and purchasing.

Excluding a small cohort of manga, light novels, picture books, celebrity memoirs or other works connected to mainstream media, books published in Taiwan have only one market: Taiwan. Peripheral markets like Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, and Malaysia offer a chance to extend sales because of a shared writing system (traditional Chinese), but do not offer opportunities to sell rights for multiple languages. Therefore, over ninety percent of international rights transactions accomplished through agents or by Taiwanese publishers themselves are purchases. International sales are very rare, and most of these are not accomplished solely by the strategic action of the publisher, but through events and sponsorship offered by government organizations like the Ministry of Culture, or NGOs like the Taipei Book Fair Foundation. 

As we investigate more deeply the front lines of publishing, we find that domestic publishers are extremely adept at “localized interpretation,” and know how to select valuable topics and marketable language amid the vast landscape of foreign- and Chinese-language books. When evaluating the former, they rely heavily on global sales records, criticism from the media and from readers, and prize records. The perennial dominance of literature in translation as well as the bestseller lists generated by bookselling channels both reflect this competency. Moreover, as editors of literature in translation are often separated from their Chinese-language counterparts inside publishing companies, an editor who wishes to market a domestic title internationally will still have a hard time gaining effective marketing language and strategy from editors across the aisle.

 “Simply carrying out the editorial duties we already have is exhausting enough. The best we can do is put together some marketing materials after the publication, find someone to translate the Chinese into English, and wait and see if foreign publishers show any interest.” I heard this response from nearly all the editors whom I interviewed. Their pessimism may simply reflect a lack of time or a shortage of resources, yet the fact that they approach international rights marketing with a Chinese-language mindset and act as if they were working for Chinese readers is itself obviously problematic.

Larger publishers and publishing groups frequently have rights departments, staffed by associates more experienced in international publishing than the editors. Yet the reality is that those associates spend nine times more time and energy purchasing international rights than selling their own. They are not credited for royalties earned through international licensing (the editorial department is), and they lack the budget in translating Chinese literature and maintaining the long-term relationship with potential international buyersintroducing. While the sale of international rights continues to bring no appreciable profit to Taiwanese publishers, motivation to do so will continue to be lacking.

Literature in translation is the most wonderful kind of cross-cultural communication: the sharing of meaningful stories between cultures. Though interest in translated literature is undoubtedly having a renaissance with a selection of publishers shouting proud about how much they want to publish more translated literature, literary journals having dedicated translation issues and the wider media exploring the process of literary translation in their articles and interviews, the amount of foreign-language literature being translated into English is still so much less than in the other direction.

The market for translated literature is still relatively niche and everyone within the translation community internationally is trying to raise its profile and whet their readers' appetite for it. During my roller-coaster sixteen months as acting editor and acting editorial consultant for the journal New Books in German I experienced how interconnected the world of translation is—and must be. To promote any literature in translation, one needs to promote all literature in translation and know the literary landscape as a whole. It would of course be wonderful to think that all publishers and readers are keeping a keen eye out for books in translation and that the strength of a book alone should be enough to carry it into another language, country and market, but unfortunately this isn't the case.

Founded in 1996, New Books in German is a project helping to get more German-language fiction, non-fiction and children's books into the international market. Both a biannual print magazine and a website, NBG publishes reviews for a selection of curated titles; interviews with publishers, writers and translators; features on current trends in German literature; and information on a selection of the latest translations in English of German books. Most of the books selected for review in the magazine are guaranteed translation funding by the financial partners of the magazine should an English-language publisher buy the rights, which is a wonderful additional incentive for publishers wishing to branch out into German literature but are put off by the irksome additional cost of hiring a translator.

The array of print and online-only publications with the same mission as NBG (including 12 Swiss Books, Swedish Book Review, Books from Finland, New Spanish Books, Fiction France, 10 Books from Holland, to name a few) likewise not only promote individual titles, but also interview literary translators, follow trends in the publishing world and bring news on the current popularity of certain genres of translated literature in general. These publications also learn and take inspiration from one another and in some instances have the same models and editorial processes as each other. The role of these publications, including NBG, is to act as mediator between the publishing houses at home and publishers abroad by highlighting a selection of their language's best (and also typically contemporary) literature. You can't pitch books blindly into a foreign market, no matter how great the book is. NBG, for example, seeks books that are first and foremost outstanding, but that would also not be too problematic to translate and that would find an English-language readership (this, I should add, is why our partnership with the German Book Office New York is so important; even the various English-language markets differ, so it's good to have a broad perspective on which books could work in English translation). The books need to have a fighting chance, so knowing the market you're trying to enter is imperative.

NBG receives financial and promotional support from a group of partners comprising the Frankfurt Book Fair and German, Austrian and Swiss cultural organisations. Representatives of these partners also make up NBG's editorial committee with additional support from the magazine's publisher the British Centre for Literary Translation, the German Book Office New York, as well as a rotating array of enthusiastic and generous guests who are publishers, agents and literary translators. Those directly involved with NBG, though representing different countries within the German-speaking world, want to support and promote the best German-language literature regardless of nation and primarily wish to strengthen the image and rate of exchange of translated literature and the variety of literature available overall. They believe in translation. Extending this idea of variety and excellence, the Frankfurt Book Fair, which distributes the magazine internationally and stocks hundreds of issues at the Fair itself, has a similar focus on promoting international literary exchange and dialogue by hosting a guest of honour nation at each Fair. NBG is proud to reflect this in each autumn issue by publishing an interview or feature on the guest nation and their literature and a guest piece by the FBF that covers a current trend or issue within the international book market.

NBG's editor of the last five years, Charlotte Ryland, has been taking the magazine and the project as a whole from strength to strength, finding new ways of promoting titles and the take up of books with new initiatives including the highly successful Emerging Translators Programme. The ETP was founded in 2011 as a way of finding and nurturing new translating talent while also helping promote the titles appearing in the magazine. Each spring, NBG invites translations of the same extract from a new German-language fiction title and commissions the translators of the six best submissions to translate samples from titles being reviewed in the upcoming NBG. They then get the chance to workshop their finished samples with an award-winning literary translator to perfect their work and learn about the process and career of a professional translator of fiction. It makes perfect sense to create a competition and immersive workshop alongside the magazine; what good is promoting German-language books if there aren't exceptional literary translators to translate them and publishers don't know where to find them? The ETP benefits all parties involved: the translators have the opportunity to hone their craft and get what is usually their first taste of translating literature professionally, the German-language publishers receive a polished sample translation at a reduced fee to use in their rights work and promotion, and NBG gets to meet the potential literary translators from German of the future that it can happily recommend to English-language publishers.

Vital to the future success of literature in translation is for publications and platforms like NBG to continue getting information and resources to the right people, while also helping with international networking. Part of the wider, ongoing work of the project is to connect publishers with their foreign counterparts, and publishers with translators, so that the ultimate objective can be achieved: international authors' books reaching the hands of international readers. Though the languages may be different, the goals are the same: the diversification of literary voices and the sharing of incredible stories.

I was invited by Philippe Thiollier, editor of L'Asiathèque Publishing House, to direct a new imprint, Taiwan / Fiction, which we launched in October this year.

Taiwan / Fiction is not strictly speaking the first dedicated series of Taiwanese literature in France. The Lettres Taïwanaises collection was created in 2000 by three professors, Chan Ching-Ho, Angel Pino and Isabelle Rabut, who have published (and sometimes translated) literary works by the Chu family (Chu Hsi-Ning, Chu T'ien-Wen and Chu T'ien-Hsin), Ch'en Yin-Chen, Chang Ta-Ch'un, Hwang Ch'un-Ming, and more recently Wuhe.

Taiwan / Fiction's goal is somewhat different to that of the Lettres Taïwanaises imprint, since the texts we will translate and publish are primarily contemporary novels and not necessarily classics or already well recognised in the history of modern Taiwanese literature. We are instead interested in writers that appears to us to be representative of new voices, new viewpoints and new literary experiments from the island.

We will concentrate on living authors who explore the changing world in which we live through their literature. Thus, we don't simply focus on historically 'representative' Taiwanese writers or literary movements, but authors whose works have a wider resonance, which are not limited to their own contexts. Of course, this doesn't mean that these authors can't talk about the singular Taiwanese experience, on the contrary, we would like to introduce in French works that can show that the Taiwanese experience illustrates and reveals the current state of our world, or generates fresh perspectives on it.

In the original statement announcing the launch of our collection, we wrote as follows:

[...] The ambition of the Taiwan / Fiction series is to translate and publish texts whose subjects and scope should go beyond Taiwan or the so-called 'Chinese world' to echo beyond it and offer new thoughts on global issues. Among them: environmental concerns, identities of local languages and cultures, the impact of colonialism on memory, of economic globalization on traditional ways of life, gender and sexuality, etc... The above topics do not necessarily imply a duty to publish so-called 'social activism' novels, but high-quality stories whose aspiration is not simply 'art for art's sake', but a wish to question our daily realities.

Hence, we hope to introduce the authors we will publish not strictly as 'Taiwanese writers' but as 'global writers with a Taiwanese view on the world.' For example, the French translation of the Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-Yi's THE MAN WITH COMPOUND EYES recently received the French International Insular Book Award. It was the first Taiwanese novel to ever receive such award in France. We hope to promote Taiwanese literature in this same vein: Taiwanese literature should not only interact with 'literature written in Chinese language' or some separate space of 'Asian literature', but must be brought into a 'world literature', where Taiwan can speak to an international audience.

Among the first texts we have selected, we will publish the queer science fiction novel MEMBRANES by Chi Ta-Wei and a unique literary experiment, the two screenplays written for the cinema classic A City Of Sadness, written by Wu Nien-Jen and Chu T'ien-Wen respectively.

In the future, we would like to introduce to French-speaking readers a variety of texts, all thematically strong and of the highest literary merit, including novels and short stories by authors such as Badai, Kao Yi-Feng, Lai Hsiang-Yin, Wu Ming-Yi, Lo Yi-Jun, Wuhe, Hung Ling, Chen Hsuë, Chu Yu-Hsun and many more.

But like in any new literary imprint, we too have encountered some (temporary) obstacles that we have had to overcome.

Firstly, we face a problem common to all Taiwanese literature in translation, namely a basic lack of media interest when compared to other 'national' literatures, such as those of China, Japan and now Korea. It is therefore important to offer significant translations with an original point of view with respect to Asian literature in general, but also books that can attract the attention of a reader who isn't necessarily attracted by Taiwan itself at first glance. Texts on issues such as ecology, war, memory, sexual identity, the vitality and reinvention of ancient religions and cultures or new technologies seem to us very powerful in this regard.

For decades, l'Asiathèque Publishing House has been a recognised and respected force in the French publishing industry specialising in texts relating to Asia. But until recent years, L'Asiathèque mostly published scientific and cultural books on the continent, such as works of classical literature and language textbooks, but very few contemporary novels. A challenge for us will be to seduce an audience who is not usually familiar with this kind of material from a publishing house such as L'Asiathèque. Hence the publication of the novel MEMBRANES, which is not only a high-quality work by a wonderful storyteller, but also offers cross readings on original issues. To us, this seems the perfect way to draw in future readers.

Another challenge we are facing is that of the small number of French translators who are familiar with Taiwanese literature and society and the presence of different Taiwanese languages in literature from the island. This question was of particular pertinence while working on the oeuvre of Kan Yao-Ming, an author we particularly admire. However, our ambition is to work with young and talented translators and we are not afraid to experiment in order to recreate the same multilingual and multicultural textures we find in the original text.

As for the rights market, since we have only just launched the series and L'Asiathèque is still not considered a publisher of general contemporary literature, it has not been easy to get a place and gain influence in the financial negotiation for the rights to contemporary works with big potential. We hope that the future success of our collection will allow us to simplify these procedures.

A final problem is of course related to the funding needed to run a project like ours. It is difficult in the early stages to accurately assess the size of our potential readership and any financial investment is a risk. Hopefully, we will be able to access French and Taiwanese cultural grants to help us in this regard.

But whatever the challenges, we are very excited about the road ahead and we can't wait to introduce to French readers the richness of Taiwanese literature.