“Anna did a sample chapter of the first of the Condor Heroes books and I sent it out to various publishers. Legends of the Condor Heroes by Jin Yong, translated by Anna Holmwood.īuckman bought the rights and sold them on to a British publisher after meeting Holmwood and discovering how little of the series was available in English. ![]() Cha, who is now 93 and lives in seclusion, created a vast imaginary world over 15 novels, which spawned films, games, comics and television shows. They became the biggest Chinese publishing hit of the last century. The plots were fictional but the historical background was real. ![]() A founding editor of the Hong Kong daily newspaper Ming Pao, in the 1950s he put together a set of stories charting the progress of a young martial arts fighter during the Song dynasty and serialised them. A novel in the wuxia, or fighting hero, tradition, it was written under the pen name Jin Yong by Chinese journalist, Louis Cha Leung-yung. Under attack from the Jurchen Jin dynasty, the future of the entire Chinese population rests in the hands of a few lone martial arts exponents. Set in China in 1200, A Hero Born tells of an empire close to collapse. “So, of course, I felt a great weight of responsibility in translating them – and even more as publication draws near.” “These books are read by so many Chinese people when they are teenagers, and the work really stays in their heads,” Holmwood told the Observer. “Jin Yong was in the top 10, though I’d never heard of him nor did I read Chinese,” he said this weekend.Ĭomparisons with Tolkien or George RR Martin might sound overblown, but in China, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Taiwan, Jin Yong’s works are classics, loved like fairytales or national legends. ![]() Louis Cha Leung-yung aka Jin Yong.Īgent Peter Buckman, who sold the rights to the series to the publisher, came across the works almost by chance as he searched the internet for “bestselling authors”. Her British publisher, MacLehose Press, plans a 12-volume series, with Holmwood’s first volume, A Hero Born, due out in February. It is a task that has already defeated several translators, yet Anna Holmwood, 32, from Edinburgh has managed it – or at least the first volume. Now, for the first time, the beginning of his extraordinarily popular series, Legends of the Condor Heroes, has been translated into English for a mainstream readership. In the west, however, his name is barely known, largely due to the complexity of the world he has created and the puzzle that has posed for translators. The world’s biggest kung fu fantasy writer, Jin Yong enjoys huge popularity in the Chinese-speaking world. For the books of Guo Jing’s creator, the author known as Jin Yong, have already sold more than 300m copies. ![]() In fact, this Chinese fighting hero is already part of phenomenon that can match both of those epics in size. Guo Jing, a young soldier among the massed ranks of Genghis Khan’s invading army and son of a murdered warrior, may soon become as familiar a questing literary figure as Frodo Baggins from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, or Jon Snow from Game of Thrones.
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