Taiwan

It is important for us to introduce to you this unique country that has absorbed many influences, becoming a melting pot of Austronesian, Chinese, Japanese, Dutch, Spanish influences and trends.

We present Taiwan in two series: contemporary literature and Taiwanese comics.

Taiwan can be proud of its cult author Sanmao, a talented female writer and cosmopolitan who discovered the world in her travels when it was still unthinkable for Asian women. Her autobiographical stories, collected in the book «The Stories of the Sahara», tell us about the distant desert in Africa, but are pierced by her own original perspective of a person from another civilization.

Another representative work from Taiwan is the historical novel «The Stolen Bicycle» by writer Wu Ming-yi, which reveals a broad panorama of the 20th century: Japanese occupation, horrors of World War II, life of the island's indigenous peoples. But not only that, as all of Southeast Asia is connected by its tragic history of the great war.

In 2024, we expect to release a documentary novel by a contemporary Taiwanese writer and former Minister of Culture of Taiwan, Long Ying-tai, «1949: Big River, Big Sea», about the civil war between the Communist Party and the Nationalist Kuomintang and the escape of nearly two million Chinese to Taiwan.

The rise and fall of Taiwanese comics can also be seen as a microcosm of the island's history. As with many cultural aspects, Taiwan's first encounter with comics occurred when it was under Japanese colonial rule. After 1949, cartoonists from mainland China came to the island to work for the needs of state patriotic propaganda. Children's magazines and illustrated periodicals, on the other hand, were produced by popular authors, so the key comics of the wuxia genre (stories about martial arts heroes) made a leap from serialization to individual volumes and achieved unprecedented commercial success, launching the first golden age of Taiwanese comics.

After the government censorship introduced in 1966, Taiwanese comics declined and were replaced by pirated Japanese manga. In 1987, after 38 years, martial law was lifted in Taiwan, creators with many different styles emerged, and the second golden age of comics began.

Among the diversity of modern Taiwanese comics, we focus on the latest works of young creators that vividly demonstrate Taiwan's cultural uniqueness. The comics «The Guardianne» tells the story of the fate of women in traditional society, where a woman's main task was to give birth to a son, and reveals the curtain on Taiwanese folklore and urban legends. «Netherwarrant» is a collection of stories about morality in fantastic settings of Buddhist afterlife. Also, in 2023 we will publish a new manhua title «The Lion in the Manga Library», where we will immerse ourselves in the world of Go game...

In our Taiwanese editions, all translated from traditional Chinese, we also use practical Ukrainian transcription of Chinese language.