Asian Americans in Arts and Entertainment - Literature

Literature

See also: List of Asian American writers and Asian American literature

Asian American writers have received numerous top awards in fiction and nonfiction writing. Women writers have been particularly prominent for their work of telling a wide range of stories of immigrant experience, changing cultures and aspects of Asian American imagination, spanning continents, eras and points of view. Maxine Hong Kingston won the National Book Critics Circle award in 1976 for her memoir The Woman Warrior. Bharati Mukherjee won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1988 for her short-story collection The Middleman and Other Stories. Jessica Hagedorn won a 1990 American Book Award for her novel Dogeaters. Chang-Rae Lee received the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for his novel Native Speaker (1995). Amy Tan has received popular acclaim for her work and had a novel produced as a film. Jhumpa Lahiri received a 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her short story collection The Interpreter of Maladies. Kiran Desai won the British Man Booker Prize (2006) and National Book Critics Circle Award (2006) for her second novel The Inheritance of Loss. Her mother Anita Desai has also been nominated for major awards for her novels. Naomi Hirahara won a 2007 Edgar Award for her novel Snakeskin Shamisen.

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Famous quotes containing the word literature:

    “Scholarship cannot do without literature.... It needs literature to float it, to set it current, to authenticate it to all the race, to get it out of closets and into the brains of men who stir abroad.”
    —Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)

    “The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign,—is it not? of new vigor, when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands and the feet.”
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    “Since people no longer attend church, theater remains as the only public service, and literature as the only private devotion.”
    —Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)