Submissions are being accepted for the Taiwan Literary Award for Migrants, a competition that aims to enrich the nation’s literary landscape with work written by Taiwan’s Southeast Asian community.
Now in its second year, the awards celebrate outstanding literary work that reflects the experience of migrant workers and foreign spouses living in Taiwan. Entrants can submit work written in Tagalog, Thai, Vietnamese or Indonesian.
Officially launched yesterday, this year’s competition is to accept submissions through the end of May. A NT$100,000 prize is to be presented to the winner, while smaller prizes ranging from NT$80,000 to NT$20,000 are up for grabs for other exceptional works.
Photo: CNA
The organizers of the awards said that literature provides an invaluable channel for migrant workers, many of whom struggle with harsh working conditions and unfamiliar environments.
Awards organizer and migrant rights activist Chang Cheng (張正) said the awards were inspired by the thousands of letters that he received during his term as editor-in-chief of 4-Way Voice, a multilingual newspaper that serves the Southeast Asian community in Taiwan.
Novelist Chu Tien-hsin (朱天心), who is a member of the judges’ panel, said that literary works written from the perspective of migrant workers hold up a mirror for Taiwanese society — revealing problems that might otherwise be difficult to discuss.
This year’s event also features a second panel of judges, including students of mixed Taiwanese and Southeast Asian heritage.
The panel will choose the three winners of a separate Youth Choice Award.
Youth judge Tseng Yu-ching (曾郁晴), a high school student from Taipei, said that she accepted the position to reconnect with her Vietnamese roots.
“I’ve always been very curious about my mother’s [Vietnamese] culture, but my mother gets upset whenever I ask her questions about it. She always says: ‘Don’t think about it, don’t you think your status brings you enough pressure in Taiwan?’”
Organizers said that preliminary judges from around the world would select 10 finalists from each of the four language categories, which would then be translated into Chinese for the judges to make the final decision.
The competition is also to employ the aid of four “observers” — native speakers of the four languages, to aid in collecting the submissions from the contestants.
One of the observers is Muhammad Abdullah, an Indonesian graduate student of environmental studies and ecology at National Dong Hwa University.
Abdullah said that literary works provide inspiration and motivation for migrant workers and that literature could help to make the lives of Indonesian workers in Taiwan “a little bit more colorful.”
For details, visit http://2014tlam-tw.blogspot.tw.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods