Two awards go to China

China won two awards at the London Book Fair, highlighting the country's growing influence on the global publishing scene.

The Market Focus Achievement Award recognized China's efforts to showcase its publishing industry in 2012, the year it was the annual fair's focus country.

Jieli Publishing House Co Ltd also won the Children's and Young Adult Trade Publisher Award, in recognition of a broad and inclusive approach to creating a catalogue that reflected high-caliber domestic and international authors and titles.

Lin Liying, vice-president of China National Publication Import and Export Corp, says China had taken the opportunity of the 2012 event to adopt an innovative approach to exchanges with the global publishing industry. It marked a milestone in the internationalization of China's publishing industry, he says

CPIEC is a government-owned publishing house that accepted the market focus award on behalf of China.

Lin says the vast variety of publishers and books that China brought to the London Book Fair in 2012, the large collection of literary events it organized and the number of famous Chinese authors who attended were all key to making China's role as the market focus country a success.

He says the impact China made at the 2012 event boosted awareness and understanding among Western publishers and readers of China's publishing landscape.

The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Chinese author Mo Yan in the same year could be seen as an indirect effect of increased understanding of Chinese literature in the West.

Wang Yanchao, rights manager for Jieli Publishing, says it was an honor for her staff to receive the Children's and Young Adult Trade Publisher Award. She says her staff placed a lot of emphasis on the quality of new titles added to the catalog.

The company's annual catalog has about 400 to 500 titles, over half of which are from a wide range of international markets, and the rest by Chinese authors.

(China Daily European Weekly 04/15/2016 page18)