Award-winning novelist David Mitchell is using the Douban Read platform, part of Douban, which is one of China’s biggest online cultural communities, to launch a translation contest for two of his short stories today (1 August 2013).

The contest is the first stage of a new collaborative research project led by Nesta, working with Douban Read, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, British Council and The Literary Platform. The translation contest is designed to generate qualitative and quantitative research to better understand the Chinese market for British writing.