The second annual Man Asian Literary Prize for English-language novels from (some) Asian nations, has been awarded to 31-year-old Filipino author Miguel Syjuco for Ilustrado, which had also won the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, the most presitigious literary prize in the Philippines, earlier this year. Syjuco flew to Hong Kong for the awards ceremony from Montreal, where he currently works as a copyeditor; he is also a graduate of the Columbia creative writing MFA program, during which time he also worked for The New Yorker and The Paris Review. So although we haven’t found any word yet of a Canadian or American publisher who’s snapped up Ilustrado, we have to imagine such news won’t be long in coming, especially given the novel’s clever backstory, which includes the metafictional gaming of Wikipedia.
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