Kunal, Coffee and Curry Puffs

Kunal Basu was the guest author at MPH's Breakfast Club. He read from the title piece from in his short story collection, The Japanese Wife in which a painfully shy Bengali boy finds a true friend in a Japanese penpal, and later marries her ... by letter. The two never meet, but remain entirely loyal to each other. It's a relationship, as Kunal says :

... of great intimacy, but no domesticity ...

Kunal had a small but very tuned in audience and it was certainly one of the liveliest Breakfast clubs that I have been to with no-one being shy to ask questions.

He talked (among other things) about how he is :

... driven by the strange ...

when he writes; about where his inspiration comes from :

I think I have a chemical imbalance in the brain ... stories germinate in my mind ...

whether he finds it easier to write short stories or novels :

... both require the same emotional passion ...

who he writes for :

I write to please myself and hope this will please others

and whether he has writing rituals :

I write fiction longhand and non-fiction on the computer, and I write fiction at home, and non-fiction at Oxford (where he a Professor of Marketing) ...

And of course he talked about the making of the film of his short story The Japanese Wife with director Aparna Sen which will start doing the rounds of the film festivals next month, and be on general release in October. It is a true piece of world cinema, filmed in English, Bengali and Japanese, and by the miracle of YouTube I managed to find this news item about it :

Aparna ready with The Japanese Wife



I have more posts to come on Kunal, so stay tuned!

Opium, Marauding Islamic Gangs, and a Squished Cat

The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft aglee, as dear old Robbie Burns once said.

Yesterday's Readings@Seksan was the one that has given me the most headache, despite the fact that I had thought I had everything pretty well arranged. Two writers had to drop out last minute due to personal circumstances, a third just didn't answer the SMSes and phone calls and was a no show. Three readers down - I felt completely jinxed.

However, the writers who did turn up more than made up for all the difficulties and made the afternoon very worthwhile.

Teoh Choon Ean (who also goes by the pen-name Cean when she writes short fiction) is one of the best-selling local authors nominated for the The Star-Popular Readers Choice Awards for her first novel , which won third prize in the Utusan Group Literary Prize 2005. You may remember she wrote Nine Lives in just six days! Despite the speed with which the book came together, I'd say (after the extract we heard) that the writing certainly did not suffer and I can see this appealing to teenagers looking for a not too difficult and unstuffy read.

Narrated by 15 year old Bee Lian, an orphan living with grandparents, who shares her secrets with the mangy yellow cat which lives next door. Cean read from the beginning and end of the story.

The poor cat got squished on the road. I was so upset ... and am seriously thinking of starting a society for the prevention of cruelty of literary animals. (Will make Peter Carey honorary president!)

It was very special to have Kunal Basu read for us at Seksan's. He asked the crowd what they wanted him to read about opium, art, race or love. They answered in chorus Opium (which makes you wonder a bit!). In my introduction I had talked about how Kunal chooses to write about places he hasn't visited and so he read us part of The Opium Clerk which was set in Kucing. He followed that with the same extract from The Japanese Wife that he had read in the morning - perfect because so self-contained, and yet giving the essence of the whole story.

During the interval there was some lively book selling going on which I am very much encouraging. Sufian Abas was selling copies of the newly released and limited edition anthology Aweks KL which is being snapped up like hotcakes. The guys from MPH brought along piles of Kunal's books and offered a generous 20% discount.

Meanwhile I was asking around - did anyone have a poem concealed about their person that they would like to read, since there was time, and it so happened that some of the good folks from Poetry Underground (a performance poetry group based at Dram Projects) had come straight from a practice! My luck was turning.

I roped them in to do a quick set to start off the second half, Sheena Baharuddin, Reza Rosli, Catalina Rebuyan, George Wilgus, and new recruit Hazlan Zakaria took the floor to deliver just one poem each in rapid succession and they got some hearty applause.


After I'd introduced Peter Brown by telling the audience that he was originally from Essex, Peter began with a very very bad Essex girl joke ("How does an Essex girl turn the light on after sex? She kicks the car door open." Ouch.)

I had called on Peter to read at the 11th hour, and was so grateful he let himself be persuaded because his short story The Last Deejay is one of my favourites in Silverfish New Writing 7 (about which more another day), a story of friendship and loyalty set against the chilling background to a dystopian Malaysia in 2027.

I'm very glad Saradha Narayanan (looking very pretty in pink!) came back to read from The Freedom of Choice and selected passages which she felt gave us an overview of the book. The most affecting part for me was the description of the adoption of the baby.

Kunal rounded off our afternoon beautifully with an extract from his second novel, The Miniaturist, about an artist prodigy in the court of Mughal emperor Akbar.

Thanks a lot to Seksan for the wonderful space, to all those who came, to those who read, to those who helped me set up and clear up, to Shahril Nizam for the blog poster.

I plan the next event for May 24th.

The Kunal Basu Interview Part 1 : Born in a Library!

My interview with Kunal Basu, author of The Opium Clerk, The Miniaturist, Racists and The Japanese Wife and Other Stories is in the current issue of Off The Edge where it looks very pretty on the page and appears alongside a piece on the author by Mark Disney. I thank the magazine for giving me permission to use this on my blog, and distributors Pansing for organising the interview. I have split the piece into two parts and the second will be up tomorrow. (This is an earlier draft version and is organised a little differently from the print version.)

Kunal Basu was, it seems, was literally born to the writing life.

His father was a publisher and who met his mother, Shabi, when he published her first book. (She is still producing two books a year at the age of 86.) Basu himself was actually born on the floor of the library of the house in Bengal, surrounded by tall bookshelves. His mother, rushing to finish a manuscript for a publisher, failed to set out for the hospital on time. His aunt cut the chord with a pair of scissors, and his father, in all the excitement forgot to register the birth. “But he kept a meticulous diary,” Basu says “and on 4th May 1956 there’s this one line : Son born. 6.43 a.m..”

He describes his childhood in a house filled with books and lively intellectual discourse, and a constant flow of visiting politicians, authors and painters. He started writing as a teenager and had some stories published in his native Bangla.

He had always thought of himself as a person in the arts, and still seems somewhat surprised that circumstances carried him in a totally different direction. He made, what he now calls, “wrong academic decisions”, studying science and maths before completing his doctorate in marketing with the University of Florida. He became Associate Professor in the Faculty of Management at McGill University, Canada, before moving to Templeton College, Oxford, where he is also the Director of the Oxford Advanced Management Program.

Whilst he says that he does not regret following this academic path, he says that there has been an internal price to pay: “As one gets older it becomes more difficult to do the things one doesn’t like. And my relationship with writing is nothing short of a grand obsession. I don’t want to do anything else anymore. I want to get up in a morning and just write.”

However, he’s grateful for the opportunities the academic life has given him to travel to parts of the world he might not otherwise have visited. His friends, though, always pull his leg about the fact that as soon as he turns up in a place, political turmoil ensues. “I was Iran when the Shah was deposed, China during the Tiananmen crisis and in Indonesia when Suharto was moving on.” Fortunately, nothing untoward happened in Malaysia on this visit.

While many Indian authors writing from the west seem to be fueled by a sense of alienation, that’s not something that comes through in Basu’s work. “We all build fiction around our lives,” he says “and my convenient fiction is that I haven’t left India, I’ve just gone travelling.”

The travels have lasted 30 years or so, but as Basu sees it, it’s been simply a matter of changing habitat rather than changing home, and he finds that rather exciting. “I love to live in different countries, different parts of the world, different houses, and have different sets of friends. Home for me in many respects is my deep seated cultural moorings and they are not necessarily parochial and not necessarily all tied to India. They are things like books that I’ve grown up with, plays that I’ve acted in or seen, favourite films. I feel very much at home around the Thames because Dickens was an early favourite of mine and the dockside and the docklands of London feel like home for me. And so there are these pegs that tie me to my world and those don’t shift very much.”

His commissioning editor once told him that although he is an Indian author, his writing doesn’t smell of curry. “I said I’m not deliberately trying to create distinction for myself, but I think there are all kinds of thing on my palate, not simply the curry.”

Indeed, Basu’s most recent novel Racists (published in 2006) is the very first Victorian novel written by a person of colour. It features an almost completely white cast of characters and explores the subject of racial science. It wasn’t, he says, written out of any kind of personal angst, and the subject matter took him completely by surprise. The novel began with a single image in his head, that of two children, one black, one white, being raised in isolation on a deserted island off the coast of Africa by a mute nurse, and untainted, as it were by “civilization”.

He knew nothing about racial science at first, but as he started to do his research in Oxford’s Bodleian library, he knew he had discovered a world he wanted to inhabit. He confesses that he is intrigued by what he calls “our indecent curiosity” into the notion of what explains difference.

The experiment at the core of Racists, he agrees, is a product of the rivalry between the two scientists, one French and one British, and the battle between their competing ideologies rather than a meaningful piece of scientific research.

“The thing is that in many ways we think of science as being very objective. But when it comes down to it, it is a human endeavour and like all human endeavours it’s permeated by competition, rivalry, bias, love, hate. Everything. So why should this experiment be any different ? And data isn’t neutral. It talks in the voice of the collector and the observer. If you have two observers, then obviously the data is ambivalent and that’s exactly the case with Belavoix and Bates were trying to do.”

It’s a truism frequently tossed in the direction of new writers that you should write about what you know, so it comes as a surprise to learn then that Basu finds it extremely exciting to write about places he hasn’t visited beforehand. If he had, he says, the experience might actually have impeded, rather than enhanced, his historical imagination.

Kucing, Sarawak, features prominently in Basu’s his first novel, The Opium Clerk. Although he only managed to make his first to the city on his way back from Australia last year, and doesn’t regret at all that he hadn’t been there when researching the novel.

“When I read the diaries and the history and started imagining Kucing, I think it was closer in many ways to Kucing of the nineteenth century. One doesn’t necessarily have to travel physically if one travels in imagination,” he says. But, he cautions, “Imagination has to be helped by research by reading the right things, and the right props are necessary.”

He set his second novel, The Miniaturist, in the court of the emperor Akbar in C16th India, but says that it was much too dangerous to travel to Afghanistan and to the Hindu Kush at the time of writing it. However, he says that he experienced the core of the story because he had travelled in the Mogul parts of India, eaten Mogul food, and listened to Sufi music, and read substantially about that period.

Tommorow, find out how the film of The Japanese Wife came to be made, and read about where Kunal gets his ideas for stories from!

(Pic above taken by Kavita of Pansing.)

Kunal's Website

Kunal Basu (whom some of you will remember from his visit to Malaysia in April, see here and here) has just sent me a link to his newly launched website.

Deepika and I can claim that we nagged him into it as we all sat having coffee one afternoon during the Singapore Writers Festival, telling him how badly all authors need them - for promotional purposes but also so that those who write articles on books and authors can find the background information in one convenient place.

Kunal's site really is a corker, I have to admit. I enjoyed browsing through the photo album (as a child above), and reading his opinion pieces on arts and society, management, and traditional crafts.

Hope it isn't too long before we see him back here again.

Readings@Seksan in April - Sticky Post

Catch our next monthly writers event! (Map) Admission free and everyone is very welcome. Please pass on the invitation to anyone else you think might be interested.

It's a little early this month, for one good reason. When author Kunal Basu contacted me to say that he would be in town, I had to grab him for the event. He will also be appearing at MPH's Breakfast Club in the morning (11-12.30 a.m.). Eric has an excellent write-up on Kunal whom I first met at the Ubud Writers' and Readers' Festival, and then again at the Singapore Writers' Festival.

The lovely poster was designed by Shahril Nizam, and I think I owe him big time!

(This post is sticky. For more recent posts, please check below.)

Singapore Stories Part 1

Singapore ... a little country that gets its priorities right! :

Arrived there Friday afternoon and went straight to the hotel to meet David Davidar (below) for the interview. He's one of the great heroes of the publishing world, putting Penguin India firmly on the world map, working with some of the greatest writers of our time, and now a novelist in his own right with The House of Blue Mangoes and now The Solitude of Emperors.

David also introduced me to Jo Lusby, general manager of Penguin in China, and what began as an interview relaxed into a fascinating chat about favourite authors, the Man Asia prize and the future of publishing.

You'll get to hear more when I've transcribed my tape and got the article written!

On the Saturday morning I made my way to the Arts House where the Singapore Writers Festival was being held and what was the old parliament building makes a stunning venue.

I went to hear Indian author, Anita Nair (above), whose novel Ladies' Coupe (a kind of updated and feminist Canterbury Tales set on a train) I thoroughly enjoyed.

Anita talked about her love of mindless violent films, making the decision to break with her advertising career, and her writing process.

I then caught David Davidar in two sessions back to back. The first moderated (very well) by novelist Meira Chand, and the second with him in conversation with Kunal Basu (below left) who manages to combine being an author of several highly acclaimed novels (The Opium Clerk, The Minaturist, and Racists) with an impressive academic career (just take a look at his CV!). He's heading for Malaysia in April so you may get a chance to meet him then.

In the afternoon it was time for our panel on litblogging - one of a series of discussions about different aspects for blogging. For me it was a chance to reconnect with my Singaporean blogging friends in "real life". Deepika Shetty (a.k.a. read@peace) was as always a skilled moderator (below), and the other panelists were Zafar Anjum (Dream Ink) blog ...

and Rambling Librarian, Ivan Chew (below far left, with me looking terribly enthused!).


There was so much to talk about, and a lot of passion for what we do, and the hour fairly whizzed past. I was sad that I didn't get a chance to chat a bit more to Ivan, whom I hadn't met before, but hope we get to connect again.

It was great also to talk to a Singaporean audience as I really would love more of them to drop by this blog and pass me book gossip from down there. (If you're from Singapore and reading this give me a wave!!)

(More pictures and stories to come!)

Postscript

Zafar captures the day very well indeed.

Stef Penney's Rattling Good Yarn

Got an e-mail from someone in the publicity department of Simon & Schuster a week or two back asking me if I'd "take another look" at Stef Penney's The Tenderness of Wolves on my blog since the book has just been launched in the US. It quite amazed me that my blog, tapped in on a keyboard in Malaysia, might help to shift some copies on the other side of the world.

Well, the book was sitting on my TBR shelf already, looking forlorn, so what was I to do?

As it turned out, this book was just the read I needed: a rattling good yarn I could slip into my bag and read in odd moments between visiting my student-teachers in schools.

You'll probably remember that the novel won this year's Costa First Novel Award, and although it's set in Canada, the author suffered so badly from agoraphobia that she was unable to travel there and instead did her research in the British Library.

Not that that matters. I remember Kunal Basu at the Ubud Readers' and Writers' festival last year talking about writing his historical novels. It was impossible for him to visit the places where he set his novels because they no longer exist. He saw this in a positive light:

What excites is inaccessibility in real terms, but accessibility in the imagination.

Stef Penney sets her novel in mid C19th Canada and chucks in a whole load of ingredients ... murder, mysterious disappearances, codes to be cracked (one which may hold the secret of an ancient written Native American language and the other a fortune in furs), love stories (gay and straight).

If the story has a weakness it is that I think the author tried to cram in too much, and in parts, especially where the backgrounds of various characters were fleshed out, it seemed terribly rushed. There were an awful lot of threads to bring together by the end of the book, and whilst Penney largely managed this, some parts were left hanging.

I was sad that we did not have a chance to see the protagonist Mrs. Ross (what is her first name??) reunited with her adopted 17 year old son Francis after she finally (and how could she really miss all the clues?) realises that he is gay and that the murdered man was his lover.

And why was she in an asylum in Scotland ... and what does that have to do with the main drift of the story?

And why was there so little about the wolves?

The cast of characters is also very large - and some came alive rather more than others. Francis intrigued me. I liked the warm-hearted but bumbling accountant, Donald Moody, still trying to find his feet with the Hudson Bay Company.

But I loved the huge and ugly half-Mohawk, half-English trapper William Parker, and was so glad that Mrs Ross ended up warming her frostbitten fingers in his armpits ... even if I'd have liked something a lot steamier to melt the frozen Tundra.

Some characters didn't rise very far of the page though, including Knox and his wife and daughters. Others were well drawn but didn't have enough of a role in the book in my opinion, e.g. Jacob and Sturrock.

I also felt that the narration worked best in Mrs. Ross' first person, and got annoyed with the godlike omniscience with which the other chapters were narrated.

But as I say, a very good read which I'd recommend as I think many of you will enjoy it.

And I wouldn't be surprised to see it makes New York Times bestseller list.

Wena's Wet Weekend

Then, after lunch and a quick rush round the supermarket to get survival rations for the afternoon with Chet's help, dashed over to Seksan's and the heaven's opened.

I was drenched even before I had unpacked the car, and the inclement weather didn't let up the whole afternoon. (What is happening to the weather? It doesn't seem like the monsoon ever went away?) But fortunately our loyal audience turned up in decent numbers. (Thank you!)

Wena Poon read a passage from her story The Shooting Ranch, my favourite story from Lions in Winter. Again, it was beautifully dramatised, and really showed how much she gets into the skin of her characters to write about them. (Not all authors - even some very big name ones - are good readers of their own work!)

Wena sadly had to rush off early as she had another appearance at Borders. I'm so glad she came, but sorry we couldn't have arranged better weather for her.

Animah Kosai (above right) dragged friends Dina Zaman (above left) ...

... and actor Na'a Murad (here getting his photo taken by a member of the press) along to read a couple of scenes from a new play she's working on called 100 Stones, which featured a woman married to a guy who has just become an elected representative. He doesn't seem to be too interested in sex, and there she is, desperately frustrated trying to seduce him with every trick in the book including sexy negligees.

It was interesting talking to Na'a in the break who reckons that the changed political landscape and the greater openness and willingness to engage in issues that has followed, is making it easier for artists of all kinds, but especially playwrights. It's early days yet ... but really, let's hope he's right.

I've been looking forward to Sufian Abas' first book for a very long time ... ever since we both got out first short stories published in Silverfish New Writing 1, in fact. Kasut Biru Robina is a collection of short shorts, some short short shorts just a few lines long. Bite size and snackable.

Sufian read a piece called Malam Mailakat Tidur (The Night the Angels Slept), and modest chap that he is, was going to end there but we encored him back for a second piece - Kisah Cinta (Love Story), a very amusing little tale about the fickleness of women.

Priya K. made an appeal for funds for the forthcoming Malaysian-UK exchange project, and illustrator Shahril Nizam brought some of his pictures along to be auctioned. The bidding is still ongoing and I'll post more about this later.

The break was extra long because the rain overhead was nosiy, but no-one seemed to mind too much as they were busy partying, networking, selling books ...

Ted Mahsun read a story, Pak Sudin's Bicycle I'd read on an e-group earlier and liked very much. He read it for the first time at Kata Suara the other week and had been surprised at how well it had gone down with the audience. Ted's writing is warm and whimsical, and it's really nice to see him developing as a writer. (He has a review of the new Stephen King book in the Star today, by the way.)

George Wielgus, poet, performer and writer describes himself as :

... a refugee from the wastelands of suburban England.

Slipping into the persona of her alter-ego, Mighty Jah-J, he gave us some hard-hitting poems, including Liberation and Death No. 1, which left us in little doubt why he had won the last KL Poetry Slam.

He was also selling his recently self-published limited edition zine for the price of a teh tarik (cup of "pulled tea"). You can read his poem Inside-Outsiders here.

We ended with a short tribute to Lloyd Fernando who passed away recently, and Priya K. read an extract from Green is the Colour.

Thanks : to all those who braved the rain, those who read, those who sold books, those who auctioned art, those who helped set up and put away and wash glasses, Shahril Nizam who designed the blogposter, and of course Seksan for the use of his beautiful space and the stunning visual backdrop provided by the current exhibition.

Our next readings is on April 19th and among the writers appearing will be author Kunal Basu.

The Kunal Basu Interview Part 2: The Japanese Wife and Other Stories

(The Kunal Basu interview continued from yesterday.)

Although Basu realises that it is impossible, as an author, to strategise for film, one of his stories is finally making the leap to the big screen. He describes as “fortuitous” a meeting with Indian film director Aparna Sen in 2006 at an Oxford dinner party. In the course of the conversation Sen said that she would love to do a love story, except that love is so boring, and everything has been written about it.

Half jokingly, Basu told her that he had a love story that was completely different, and related the story of The Japanese Wife, a short story that had been lying in his desk drawer for ten years. It describes the tender relationship between a Bengali schoolteacher and his pen-friend, a Japanese woman. The two never meet, but agree to a marriage. “It is a relationship of great intimacy,” says Basu “but no domesticity.”

As soon as Sen read the story she was determined make the film and asked Basu to write the screenplay. He turned down the offer, feeling that it would find it difficult to revisit the story with his original passion. But he has remained involved with the production and says that he is very happy indeed with what he has seen of it so far.

“It’s not Indian cinema dubbed for a diaspora audience abroad, but world cinema like Pedro Almodóvar’s films and Il Postino, which people all over the world can relate to.” The film is scheduled for general release in October. Since it seemed strange to make a film from an unpublished short story, it was clearly the right time to bring out a whole collection.

Basu has always loved writing short fiction but says that it was always an uphill struggle to persuade his publishers that they were commercially viable. He says that he would like to debunk the myth that short stories don’t sell once and for all.

“All publishers need to do is believe in their short story collections. If you start out saying I don’t believe this book will sell, then it won’t. But if you believe in it passionately, then you can convey that passion to readers.” It is a viewpoint he’s in a good position to defend with this first collection currently riding close to the top of the bestseller list in India.

Basu jokes that his stories arise from “a sort of chemical imbalance in the brain. First, he must get himself into the right state of mind, which he describes as a relaxed state of free floatation.

Writers can’t get too anxious about getting their stories down to the page: “It’s like when you’re young trying to find a girlfriend. If you’re too purposive about finding a girlfriend you’ll never meet her. But if you’re totally loose in your life, if you’re totally relaxed, then you’ll bump into her.”

Stories might be sparked by the smallest of things, a chance encounter, snatches of conversation, a small newspaper article. If he’s struck with the starting point of stories he pushes them further asking “What would happen if?”, and exploring the possibilities.

He says he writes only those that keep him awake at night. “Take for example Grateful Ganga, the second story in The Japanese Wife. I was in India and I was reading a newspaper, cup of tea in my hand, and there’s this little story about Jerry Garcia. Apparently he had two wives and one of the wives came to India with a cask of ashes to immerse them in the Ganges. The story was that when she went back, the other wife said ‘How dare you disappear with my husband’s ashes?’ and they had this fight over them.

“I wasn’t interested in that, but in the whole image of this western woman on a plane with a cask of ashes, coming to India for the first time. All she wants to do is go to the Ganges, immerse the damn thing, and go back. Except that she gets waylaid by circumstances. On the plane she meets this middle-aged pot-bellied Punjabi business man who loves the music of Kishore. So I said, that’s interesting. What if this were to happen?, What if that were to happen? He’s going to be married and that’s going to create a few problems, how does he deal with that? How’s his wife going to react? On the one hand you’ve got great Indian hospitality for a guest. Except the wife suspects that this guest is having an affair with her husband. So how would that go? It’s important for me to keep day dreaming or float. Hopefully I would have seen something that later I would have on would become a story.”

Basu continues to find inspiration in the unlikeliest of places. He describes how, on a recent trip to Beijing, once again wearing the hat of academic, he was invited to a banquet by one of his former students, now the director of a school for public health, attached to one of the biggest schools for Chinese medicine. He almost declined the invitation fearing that the evening would be boring, but civility won out. After the meal, his student told him that there was a museum of traditional Chinese medicine upstairs and asked whether he would be interested in seeing it. He was. As he walked around the two floors of exhibits that the got the idea for his next novel, about a young Portuguese doctor seeking a cure for syphilis.

He’s interested in particular with the philosophical underpinnings of the contrasting eastern and western attitudes to health. It’s this scholarly thoroughness and a willingness to deal with deeper intellectual issues that marks out Basu’s novels from most other historical fiction, and thus it comes as something as a surprise that he hasn’t yet enjoyed the commercial success his work deserves, or been nominated yet for literary prizes. But he’s quite sanguine about that.

“You cannot simple lead an authors life thinking when will the bells ring for me and when am I going to win an award?”

“We are in a domain where there are no defined measures of success and the marketing hype of books often times surpasses real appreciation. We’ve commoditized everything in life, you know, including the arts.

“ I’m much more of a traditionalist in that regard, and if my books stay on bookshelves twenty-five years after I’ve died and different people read them, then I will think that I have succeeded.”

Believing in Your Story Collections

One of the things that Kunal Basu said to me the other day which really struck home. :

I'd like to debunk once and for all the notion that short stories don't sell. All publishers need to do is believe in their short story collections. If you start out saying I don’t believe this book will sell, then it won’t. But if you believe in it passionately, then you can convey that passion to readers.

I got news today that made my day! Eric Forbes sent me an SMS to say that Wena Poon's Lions in Winter has been nominated for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize, the world's richest award for short fiction. (Other nominated authors include Anne Enright and Jhumpa Lahiri.)

The book is there because Eric and Janet Tay* of MPH believed in the book, not only enough to publish it, but also enough to promote it overseas. (This could be the first time that a work of fiction published by a local publisher has been listed for an international award.)

Update :

More on this year's Frank O'Connor prize at the Guardian.

*How nice if those guys could start their on literary imprint with MPH!

Bibliobibuli for Singapore Writers' Fest

I've been a bit slow to post up something about the Singapore Writer's Festival which is happening from December 1st - 9th. I was waiting until the information about the session I'm involved in was posted up on the website!

I'm in a panel discussion on December 8th with Channel News Asia's Deepika Shetty and Ivan Chew*:

A treat for book lovers out there, World Wide Web of Words – Literary Blogs, brings together online communities of readers and writers. Thoughtful and insightful, our panelists will talk about their favourite page-turners and web pages! Log on and join in the fun!

Of course, while you're down there to see us (!) you might like to check out some authors who will be appearing including our own Tash Aw, Tan Twan Eng, A. Samad Said, Faisal Tehrani, Sharanya Manivannan and that superstar of local bloggers, Kenny Sia.

Or some of the other big names from across the world including Jung Chang (Wild Swans), Su Tong (Raise the Red Lantern), Kunal Basu (Racists), Irish poet Paddy Bushe, Israeli author Eli Amir, UK performance poet Charlie Dark, and cookery writer Madhur Jaffrey.

And of course all of Singapore literature's brightest and best ...

It's going to be a lot of fun for book lovers ... though I am frustrated that I won't be able to stay down in Singapore for the whole nine days.

(More discussion of highlights on Deepika's blog.)

Afterthought:

Really hate to sound ungrateful about something I'm actually very very grateful for, but am finding the website a nightmare to negotiate. I'd love a print out of the whole programme but there doesn't seem any way of doing this ...

(*I typed Eric Forbes before this as I had seen his name on the initial invite ... Sorry for misinformation. I seem to have been spreading a lot of it today.)

More Festival Photos

A few more pics from the Ubud Writers' and Readers' Festival.

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!