The wonderful Anita Desai with festival organiser Janet de Neefe.
One of the biggest names of the festival, historian William Darlymple who gave a fascinating slide presentation based on his book The White Mughals.
Madhur Jaffrey. I owe her such a debt of gratitude for some of my favourite recipes ...
Dina again. This time with "emerging writers" Vira Safitri and Singaporean poet Yong Shu Hoong in a panel discussion entitled On the Pulse. The moderator for the session is a dynamic lady called Irina Dunn who is Executive Director of the NSW Writers' Centre. (When I googled Irina's name I discovered that she was the coiner of the infamous phrase so beloved of feminists "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle".)
The three of them ...
Shu Hoong again. This time snapped at the Brazilian Beats evening event (billed as "a wild night of poetry, music and dancing" tho' we weren't wild!) where he read. I was so happy to have the chance to chat to Shu Hoong because the last time we came across each other during the KL Litfest, I was too stressed to be coherent! Shu Hoong has given up his day job in banking for a freelance writing career, and I really wish him luck.
Elmo Jayawardena. When he's not winning awards for his fiction (The Last Kingdom of Sinhalay and Sam's Story) he's flying 747's for Singapore Airlines! he is also the founder/president of AFLAC (Association for Lighting a Candle), a humanitarian organization working to alleviate poverty in Sri Lanka.
Kunal Basu juggles being a fellow in Strategic Marketing at Oxford University and writing historical novels - The Opium Clerk, The Minaturist , and more recently Racists.
A blog friend moves into real life! Here's the dynamic Deepika Shetty of Channel News Asia. Her knowledge and enthusiasm about books and writers made her the perfect moderator.
Artist/photographer/poet and tango dancer, Vietnamese-born Mong Lan is an incredibly talented lady. I moderated her session with another artist/poet Amol Titus.
C.S.Lakshmi writes her short stories as Ambai and is one of the most important fiction writers in Tamil. I am enjoying A Purple Sea, the only collection so far to be translated into English. She is also an independent researcher into Women's Studies and is the director of SPARROW (Sound and Picture Archives for research on Women).
Shauna Singh Baldwin (left) is the highly acclaimed author of What the Body Remembers and The Tiger Claw. Gail Jones was longlisted for the 2004 Booker Prize for Sixty Lights. The discussion between these two novelists was one of the events I enjoyed most during the festival.
Festival organisers get together to spill the beans about what goes on behind the scenes. (Manifold tales of writerly drunkeness, debauchery and prima donnaness! Very funny!) From left - Nury Vittachi, organiser of the Hong Kong Literary Festival, Byron Bay Writers' Festival Director Jill Eddington, Janet de Neefe, and moderator Deepika Shetty.Will be writing about some of these events and writers and more in the coming weeks, as the notebook pages slowly get deciphered and transcribed!
14 comments:
WoW! Sounds so exciting... Too bad you wouldn't share the "tabloid" bits in your notebooks! ;)
sharanya - i will whisper the best tabloid bits when i see you. i wish you could meet ambai - i think you'd love each other because you're both so passionate about women's issues. have you read her stuff?
tabloid bits - erm (sharon's so gonna kill me...)
two malaysian delegates got locked in the loo; not at the same time :)
OW - sharon throwing a book at me.
more stories please. more, more, more!
two malaysian degates saying to each other "you'll nnever guess waht just happened to me" and finding they had the same story to tell! i think the owners of the venue deliberately played this trick on us to see how we would cope in adversity
more stories for sure, jane
Sharon, first off what a time we had! Truly delighted to have finally met you and then done a panel together. Bloggers of the world unite!
The pictures are lovely, can I steal some for my blog? This morning I start to look at the footage, the first of many Ubud stories will be out on Friday on an Off The Shelf special. I have done so many interviews with so many authors that I have enough to fill at least 10 segments - a darn good thing really.
Wow, Kunal Basu: a while back I read Racists. It was so very absorbing. His European characters were so believeable, reminding me of how Ishiguro can do that also with English ones.
hi deepika. hope you and your family had a great time in bali. please take as many pics as you want. i have another to email to you. i am so sad that i didn't get photos of some other people i want to write about ...
as i keep saying i have so much more in my notebooks. i have written a short piece for the star on anita desai but don't know yet whether it will meet their deadline. either way i'll post it up here.
but it takes time to transcibe all that great material. started writing about shauna singh baldwin and gail jones but haven't had time to finish it yet. blogging should be a profession and well paid!!!
we don't get channel news asia here which is really sad 'cos i'd love to see the footage and relive the best parts of the festival
leon - kunal basu impressed for sure, especially reading his book 'racists'. i wanted to buy his books - but oh the frustration of not being able to carry anymore. will buy them here in kl when i am more solvent.
"wild night of poetry, music and dancing"
The human condition is always interesting. Soon it will be "wild night at home with the TV".
that's about as wild as i get, anon
Yes..one day it will be light that for me too. Sad but true, how the idea of a wild night changes as you age.
You have quite a few of my favourite writers featured in your latest post - Dalrymple , Basu and Singh Baldwin . Will be back for more
this is a post about last year's festival ... lots more on this year's ... and much more i haven't blogged yet! nice to see you here anyway
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