Thinner Than Skin makes the Man Asia Prize longlist!

Canadian / Indian edition

Okay, this is a big, big deal.

Thinner Than Skin, the recent novel by the lovely and talented Uzma Aslam Khan, has been selected for the longlist for the 2012 Man Asia Prize. This prize is the Asian version of the better-know Man Booker Prize, which creates literary celebrities more or less overnight (Yann Martel won the Booker a few years ago for Life of Pi, and went from obscurity to superstardom). In 2006 or so, the people who run the Booker Prize decided to acknowledge the groundswell of literature coming out of Asia, both written in English and in translation, and set up a prize specifically for the region.

US edition

The longlist consists of 15 books, and can be seen here. Titles include some pretty big names, such as Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak, and some hot books from 2012, like Jeet Thayil's Narcopolis and Tan Twan Eng's The Garden of Evening Mists.

In any case, it's terrific that an indie author like Uzma, published by a small press like Interlink, is able to catch the attention of such a high-powered committee. It just goes to show the strength of the book. Comments from the Prize committee concerning Uzma's novel can be read here.

By the way, some of the online stores are claiming that the book will take weeks to ship, as they have run out of stock. Actually, the publishers are  rushing more copies as we speak, so Amazon.com and Amazon.ca should have them much sooner than they currently claim. So don't be wary about ordering.