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Man Booker Shortlist: Translating Censored Chinese Writer Yan Lianke

This month the winner of the prestigious Man Booker International Prize will be announced. Weekend is featuring all six of the shortlisted books before the winner is made public. Unusually the $72,000 prize money is divided equally between the writer and the translator.

The books of Chinese writer Yan Lianke have caused him some trouble at home. His latest, The Four Books, which is nominated for this year's award, while not actually officially banned, remains unpublished in China. Set in a re-education camp during Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward of 1958, it describes how a group of intellectuals are abandoned by the state during the subsequent famine. Weekend's Julian Worricker spoke to the book's translator Carlos Rojas.
(Picture: Carlos Rojas.Credit: Penguin RandomHouse).

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2 minutes

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