From Refugee Baby to Award-Winning Author

Vietnamese-Australian author Nam Le has won the international Dylan Thomas Prize for young writers for his first collection of short stories. The award, worth £60,000 recognises the best young writer in the English-speaking world and ensures that the inspirational nature of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas' writing will live on.

Le arrived Australia as a baby with his refugee parents . He grew up in Melbourne and studied law at Melbourne University. At 25 he joined the famous Iowa Writers Workshop where he wrote the stories in The Boat. He now works in New York, where he is the fiction editor of the Harvard Review, and will take up the David T.K. Wong fellowship at the University of East Anglia next year to work on his second book.

The Sydney Morning Herald quotes Peter Florence, chairman of the judges, as saying of Le's work that it demonstrated :

... a rare brilliance that is breathtaking both in the scope of its subject matter and the quality of its writing. Nam tackles his own background and circumstances as well as that of others with a clear eye, focused intelligence and wonderful use of words.

While Ben Ball at Penguin Australia, commended the impressive shortlist for the prize, but remarked :

But Nam has another gear that takes him further into unexpected geographical or emotional territory. He has said that every sentence is an opportunity to lose a reader, so he can't let a semi-dud one by.

(I bolded that bit because I think that every writer who wants to suceed should engrave that on his/her heart!)

Here's Nam Le's website for The Boat, where you can read an extract and reviews, as well as more about the author.

Janet Tay reviewed the book some time back in Starmag. (The unedited version is here.) Eric blogged an email interview with the author here. Eric also wrote about the other shortlisted books.

Congrats to the author, and let's give a big cheer for the short story (which folks predicted was dying, not so long ago, but which just doesn't lie down and give up that easily!)

I've not yet read the book (I stared at it, it stared back at me in Kinokuniya when I was making tough choices) but hope to soon.

Riveting Readings

Yesterday's Readings at Seksan's went wonderfully well. My biggest thanks go Reza who took the time and trouble to go shopping for a portable sound system for me, and came up with the perfect solution. For the first time, we were amplified. And what a difference it made! No longer did we have to strain to hear. No longer did we have to much the words of the quietest writers.

It has to be said though that Seksan's doggy (recovering from distemper) decided that he had things of his own to say - though addressed to his friend over the back wall rather than to us. Fortunately, when Amir Muhammad stepped up to the microphone, he settled down to listen too.

Amir is of course a famous indie film-maker whose work has won international critical acclaim, although at home all he's won is controversy for The Last Communist. His next banned film is Apa Khabar Orang Kampong and is due to premier at the 57th Berlin Film Festival next month. Amir is also has a column in the New Straits Times on Thursdays. (You may not be speaking to the newspaper anymore, as indeed I am not, but Amir's column is a must-read.)

Amir read us some of the pieces that his editor thought unsuitable and very funny they were too. There was a spoof review of M - The Opera; a news item about folks who move into a house but find themselves under seige by the former occupant who constantly criticises what they are doing to the property; and also a piece entitled (topically enough!) Should I Sue for Defamation? Apparently, Amir keeps receiving letters from readers who are unclear on the concept of satire, and take his columns at face value. Duh!

I'm still practising saying Thaatchaayini Kanantu's full name! I met Thaatch at the launch party for Silverfish New Writing 6, and very much enjoyed the extract from her novel in progress. She had agreed to read In God's Belly later in the year, but when Hsiung Han See called at the last minute to say he wouldn't be able to come, I roped her in for this month ... and she sportingly agreed. Very many thanks, Thaatch!

I like what she wrote on her blog about writing:

I have 7-tonnes of memories resting in a million buckets and I have no idea how they got there, why they are there and what potential use they have.

Well we know now that sitting in those memory buckets is plenty of raw material for more evocative stories ...

Another writer from SNW6 - Peter Hassan Brown. I've known Peter for years, but as half of the singing duet Passion with his wife Markiza. Peter read from his short story Dysfunction, introducing it by saying he had been afraid of a negative reaction to his portayal of the family in the story (the girl lepaks* at the LRT station, her brother is a drug-addict who steals from the mother to finance his habit), but I think it's a very well-observed piece that really comes alive for me. I loved too his poem Fritters - about the food and about frittering one's life away in the most enjoyable way.

Peter is now working on a novel.

Yes, I know I shouldn't keep banging on about this guy being just 17. What does age have to do with anything? Least of all with the ability to write really well. kG's poems are honest, sexual, often deeply painful and beautifully crafted. He also read an extract from a "long short story".

Okay then, 17 going on 28.

It was great to finally meet Jordan MacVay, after months of reading each other's blogs and exchanging e-mails. Although he confessed to "sweating like a whore in church" with nervousness, he read really well, the piece beautifully chosen.

Jordan has been working with Rizal, an Achenese tsunami survivor, to tell his story. This extract was amusing in places - especially with the - almost surreal - incongruity of Rizal and his friend floating in the sea and encountering six naked girls floating on a tree. And also deeply moving. (Read Jordan's account of the afternoon here.)

Burhanuddin Baki has a place on the MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia for later in the year. And having heard him read his fiction - am not at all surprised that he was selected. What did surprise me was how funny his work is - I'd imagined he would write in a very literary, very serious way from his very learned comments on my blog and from his business card (he has first class degress in Maths and Philosophy! Scary!). The reference to "the giant millipede" (am sorry, won't explain the context for the more impressionable minds reading this blog) was unexpected - and hilarious! Well, Burhan, just hurry up and give us the whole novel!

What else? It was a very hot afternoon, and I think we were all melting. We had a larger than usual crowd there (around 30), and because of the sound system, they tended to spread out a bit more into all the arty nooks and crannies. The wine this month was rubbish because I bought el cheapo plonko myself (RM15 a bottle - doubles as drain cleaner) - the La Bodega sponsorship has to be renewed and I'm onto that ...

Thanks to all who read and all who came. (I'm sorry I did not have more time to chat.) Thanks to Seksan once again for the beautiful and inspiring space. Thanks again to Reza for his help. Thanks to Nic for letting himself be bullied into washing glasses and opening wine bottles ... and for keeping me calm ('cos as he noticed I have this tendency to panic and see in my mind's eye everything that could possibly go wrong ... but doesn't).

Update

Just as well I escorted Lainie, and Danny off the premises! kG's thoughts.

Glossary

*lepak = to hang out, but has a very negative connotation, especially in the Malaysian pressL

The Real David T. K. Wong

Though I may have toasted David T. K. Wong a few months ago for setting up a fellowship that annually funds a South-East Asian writer to do the MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, I knew nothing about the man himself.

But then Yang-May Ooi met him at a party and got a chance to find out. Do read.

Coming to Terms

The Silverfish litmag both online and in its printed form (pickupable from the the shop) is growing ever more substantial and interesting, and the website is now much less clunky. Not bad for a publication that's effectively a one-man show, (though one of my reviews is in there, and a good short story by Robert Raymer).

Raman has also slipped in a couple of eloquent sound-off pieces. He takes issue with the term "creative writing" and talks about how creative writing courses are invariably rip-offs creating unreal expectations for those who just want easy fixes, while the charlatans who teach such course just run away with the money, I suppose.

The article by Sam Sacks that Raman refers to is well worth a read. It highlights the dangers of formulaic teaching of creative writing "rules", resulting in a homogeneity of style which can undoubtedly be seen in much recent American writing. (Golden's Memoir's of a Geisha is wonderfully formulaic, for example, and he was a product of such a course.)

The UEA course on the other hand has continued to turn out distinctive writers, Rattawat Lapcharoensap, Tash Aw, Diana Evans, Tracy Chevalier, Andrew Miller, and Toby Litt. My favourite new writer of last year, Marina Lewycka did the creative writing MA at Sheffield Hallam University. (Not Union Jack-waving here but.)

As Tash said on that occasion at Silverfish :

No-one's ever going to teach you how to write. The (UEA) course makes you look at your own work and develop critical skills very quickly.

And that really is the heart of the matter. Rule bound formulaic teaching vs. providing the opportunity for writers to discover what works for them, and what doesn't, in a relatively unstressful environment.

There are courses and there are courses, then. Teachers worth their salt need to constantly reevalaute their methodology and ask themself the toughest of questions - what kind of writers are we producing? The UEA course is clearly doing something right: the Iowa Writers workshop perhaps not.

I could argue much further but won't. Raman's piece is well worth a read, and you might also like to look at some of my previous posts about creative writing courses.

Raman's other rant is against the term post-colonial literature. And here, I agree with him entirely. I guess it's just that those who spend time in the academic pursuit of Literature (with a big L) need lots of funny expressions that make the rest us mere readers feel like ignorant yoiks.

So You Want to Write Like Ian McEwan?

A good discussion about the value of MA courses in creative writing in The Independent today. There's been a lot of debate about such courses, but as Diane Evans says in this article:

"The argument about whether creative writing can be taught has more or less been won. The techniques of fiction can be imparted, as can the techniques of acting, music and painting. Talent cannot be induced but where it already exists, it can be accelerated and focused."

Wonder if what she says about universities becoming "responsible eventually for saturating an already overcrowded market with bland fiction" will turn out to be true? Wonder if it is happening to some extent already?

And "About 80 per cent of creative writing graduates do not become published authors. Just think if that was the statistic for medical schools." I wonder what happens to 'em?

Good advice for all writers: "A text has to sell itself. What they are looking for is sentences that from the very first paragraph have a truth to them, contain interesting ideas and straightforward elegance. Sentences can swing into life on a single active verb; they should also have rhythm and a pulse. Characters should not be self-absorbed, but observers of their world and that world should build into something compelling. If it is a known world (World War Two, for example), take a fresh and unique angle. Characters are best executed through the work they perform and should be emotionally authentic. Don't try to imitate recent successes, as the market constantly changes. Writers create the market and not the other way round."