Featured Authors
Prof.
Lung Yingtai
Liglav A-wu
Shu-Wen Hu
Kaori Lai
Pam Pam Liu
Kaori Lai
賴香吟
Before engaging in writing full-time, Lai pursued graduate studies in Japan, and worked in universities, bookstores, and museums. She is the recipient of numerous domestic honors including the Wu Zhuoliu Literary Prize and the Taiwan Literature Awards. Now a resident of Berlin, her previous works include non-fiction such as Love Before Daybreak: Taiwanese Literary Landscapes Under Japanese Rule; the novel Afterwards; the short story collections Island, The Death of a Literary Youth, and Landscapes in the Mist; and Prehistoric Life, a collection of essays.
Portraits in White
白色畫像
Fiction
May 19, 1949, the declaration of martial law in Taiwan signals the start of the White Terror—nearly four decades of intense surveillance, disappearances, and political oppression targeting Taiwanese people resistant to Chiang Kai-Shek’s authoritarian rule. This collection of three novellas demonstrates the ongoing struggle to maintain normalcy—the simplest of dreams: the pursuit of an ordinary life—in a time of political repression.
Publisher: INK Literary Monthly Publishing Co., Ltd.
272 pages | 14.8 × 21 cm
ISBN: 9789863875079
Rights Contact: [email protected]
- Rights Sold: English
- 2022 Taiwan Literature Awards/ Annual Golden Grand Laurel Award
- 2023 TIBE Book Prize
Love Before Daybreak: Taiwanese Literary Landscapes Under Japanese Rule
天亮之前的戀愛
Non-fiction
#Essays #Family Bonds #thoughts on the meaning of separation #love and death
With the intensity of an affair, this novella pays homage to Taiwan’s unconventional pioneer writers—from the exploration of the 1920s to the diverse, unrestrained works of the 1940s—all while inviting comparison with modern literature in Taiwan. The writers depicted in this book, no matter how challenging their circumstances, foster their passions through the night, passions which, come morning, must evaporate like dew. Through short stories, Kaori Lai summons fourteen Taiwanese novelists from the Japanese colonial period, depicting both ambitions and oppressive realities, one fragment at a time.
Publisher: INK Literary Monthly Publishing Co., Ltd.
264 pages | 14.8 × 21 cm
ISBN: 9789863872757
Rights Contact: [email protected]
- 2019 Taiwan Literature Awards
The Death of a Literary Youth
文青之死
Fiction
Kaori Lai’s collection of short stories, reflecting upon the 1970s, assumes that generation’s perspective and writes for us their worlds. Over the course of a decade, endangered relationships crystallize, emotions stay unsettled, and a life lived with anxiety advances with the utmost seriousness.
Publisher: INK Literary Monthly Publishing Co., Ltd.
264 pages | 14.8 × 21 cm
ISBN: 9789863870845
Rights Contact: [email protected]
Afterwards
其後それから
Fiction
In this work, Kaori Lai brings readers into the disconnected 1960s, highlighting how a female writer responds to emotion and trauma—how, for example, she returns to writing, a practice she had previously abandoned, after the death of a LGBTQ+ close friend.
Publisher: INK Literary Monthly Publishing Co., Ltd.
256 pages | 14.8 × 21 cm
ISBN: 9789866135859
Rights Contact: [email protected]
Island
島
Fiction
Pain, when suppressed, leaks as a voice that speaks delusion. Island is a novel, created over the course of thirty years, which deftly illustrates Taiwan’s diversity, while demonstrating the author’s literary growth. Centering ordinary lives, it communicates to the reader numerous political events and societal changes, which combine to exert a profound impact on Island‘s characters. Through the incorporation of history, politics, and human nature, the novel’s three-decade-long incubation has formed an “Island” of profound sentiment.
Publisher: UNITAS Publishing Co.
304 pages | 14.8 × 21 cm
ISBN: 9789863234685
Rights Contact: [email protected]
