eric forbes’s book addict’s guide to good books

2009 Costa Book Awards

2009-11-24T15:18:00.000-08:00

CHRISTOPHER NICHOLSON, the author of The Fattest Man in America (2005), has been shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award for his second novel, The Elephant Keeper, alongside such literary heavyweights as Penelope Lively for Family Album, Hilary Mantel for her Man Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall, and Colm Tóibín for Brooklyn.

Clive James, Ruth Padel and Christopher Reid have been shortlisted for Poetry, while William Fiennes, Caroline Moorehead and the late Simon Gray have been shortlisted for Biography.

Novel
1. Family Album (Fig Tree, 2009) / Penelope Lively
2. Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate, 2009) / Hilary Mantel
3. The Elephant Keeper (Fourth Estate, 2009) / Christopher Nicholson
4. Brooklyn (Viking, 2009) / Colm Tóibín

First Novel
1. The Finest Type of English Womanhood (Hutchinson, 2009) / Rachel Heath
2. John the Revelator (Faber & Faber, 2009) / Peter Murphy
3. Beauty (Tindal Street Press, 2009) / Raphael Selbourne
4. The Girl with Glass Feet (Atlantic Books, 2009) / Ali Shaw

Poetry
1. Angels Over Elsinore: Collected Verse 2003-2008 (Picador, 2008) / Clive James
2. One Eye’d Leigh (Carcanet Press, 2009)/ Katharine Lilalea
3. Darwin: A Life in Poems (Chatto & Windus, 2009) / Ruth Padel
4. A Scattering (Arete, 2009) / Christopher Reid

Biography
1. The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius (Faber & Faber, 2009) / Graham Farmelo
2. The Music Room (Picador, 2009) / William Fiennes
3. Coda (Faber & Faber, 2008) / Simon Gray
4. Dancing to the Precipice (Chatto & Windus, 2009) / Caroline Moorehead

Children’s
1. Solace of the Road (David Fickling Books, 2009) / Siobhan Dowd
2. Trobadour (Bloomsbury, 2009) / Mary Hoffman
3. The Ask and the Answer (Walker Books, 2009) / Patrick Ness
4. Guantanamo Boy (Puffin, 2009) / Anna Perera

The winner of each category will be announced on January 5, 2010, while the overall Book of the Year on January 25, 2010.

ESSAY ... Annabel LYON

2009-11-22T04:00:00.000-08:00

She Writes Fiction!
ANNABEL LYON, the author of the Scotiabank Giller Prize-shortlisted The Golden Mean, talks about learning the craft of writing fiction

I’M A PIANO TEACHER. When people ask me what I do, that’s what I say. Until my book, Oxygen, was published I was secretive about writing fiction. Only a few of my students knew I had an MFA in creative writing; I think a few of them thought “Master of Fine Arts” meant art history or something to do with music. I let them think that. After the book came out, the kids in particular were (for a week or two) fascinated. They would confront me on the piano bench. “We saw you in the paper,” they would say slyly (of a review plus photo), like they had caught me doing something sneaky, shameful, and bad. Me! The piano teacher! They acted up more in lesson, laughing at me when I was clumsy and arguing with me when I was bossy, as though the walls between childhood and adulthood (tenuous at the best of times) had been fatally breached. She writes fiction!

At first I thought it was because they had no experience of persons who write fiction. They had never seen one before. One even asked how I had learned to do that, which was smart but sad—he knew you didn’t learn it at grade school. I know I didn’t.

My dad taught me to write when I was six. I don’t mean write as in read and write, shape my little letters, make endearing clumsy sentences like something out of stickle bricks—Today is Thursday! My pet ran fast—but write as in craft-honed, no-nonsense adult prose. I was not grateful. At six, you are already stitched pretty tightly into the world. Look both ways, brush your teeth, comb your hair, don’t scream, don’t shout, don’t be rude, listen to your teacher, eat your salad, practice your piano, don’t tease your brother. My thinking was, there’s more?

Here are some of his rules: If you’ve said something in six words and you can say it in four, say it in four. No underlining, italics, ellipses, or exclamation marks (which he called “screamers”). Keep sentences and paragraphs short. Get to the point. Don’t use big words to try to make yourself sound important. He taught me other stuff, too, newspaper stuff about typesetting and fonts and margins, that I’ve long since forgotten. Crucially, though, I accepted what he taught me about writing the way I accepted the truths of mathematics, becoming an instant mini-minimalist. No one expects you to have developed your own voice before you can make two plus two equal four.

Out of this small, tight prose style I gradually forged a small, tight ambition: to chisel out tough little sentences and stories and get paid for them.

Flash forward to the Creative Writing program at the University of British Columbia, in 1994, when I started my master’s. Now some people would say this was a bad idea. In July’s Quill & Quire Bill Richardson accuses a writer of perpetrating the “fractured jargon of the MFA,” as though they were handing out large jargon-fracturing mallets at convocation. But, you have to understand, I had just finished a philosophy degree and was writing sentences like this: “If computational characterizations merely specify rules for the manipulation of symbols, it seems that information—the semantic content of such symbols—should have no effect on the computational level.” Writing fiction for two years seemed like cool water.

Literary people get very excited about literary programs: they are wonderful, they are terrible, writing can’t be taught, you can spot an MFA by her prose style (bad), you can spot an MFA by her prose style (good), it’s a useless degree, it’s a hothouse, a unique experience, if you’re good enough to get in you don’t need to be there, it’s nurturing, it’s killing, yada, yada. Me, I liked it; I found it helpful. I learned a lot of small, concrete things. I learned that every line of dialogue does not need “she said” or “he says” as a tag, and that adverbs appended to such tags (“he chortled heartily”) are usually mistakes. I learned that I had a weakness for lists. I learned to avoid lengthy descriptions of insignificant characters. I learned to treat a short story like a carrot and chop off the green woody stuff at the beginnings and the too-pointed stuff at the end to make it tastier. A lot of people come into the MFA program knowing these things already, but I didn’t, so I was grateful for the information.

In each of these apprenticeships, I was encouraged to adopt a particular style. My journalist dad held up Hemingway and The Economist (amongst others) as practitioners of the kind of taut, terse writing he admired. Most of my peers and teachers at UBC championed the well-made contemporary North American short story emotionally subtle, character-driven, realist. (Note the long, long shadow of Alice Munro.) The pitfall of any apprenticeship, as Bill Richardson and many others imply, is that you’ll come out sounding like your master, and I’ll plead guilty to that. I’ll bet most of my piano students sound a lot like me, too. Eventually, though, we all have to shuck off the school uniform and figure out what’s left underneath, and that’s when the process gets dangerous, and interesting.

Which brings me full circle, to the secrecy. The writing I’m doing right now is a mess. I tried to write a novel; it imploded. (Hollow core.) I tried to change my prose style (longer sentences, longer paragraphs, less cleverness, more depth) and went from sounding like someone who’d read too much Hemingway to someone who’d read too much Faulkner. I’m a kid again, locked in my bedroom after school, trying to make something good without anyone looking over my shoulder. My students, I think, are wicked smart little animals; they smelled one of their own.

This essay was originally published in the October 2000 issue of Quill & Quire

Tina KISIL ... Footprints in the Padi Fields (MPH Publishing, March 2010)

2009-11-20T15:22:00.000-08:00

TINA KISIL’S FOOTPRINTS IN THE PADI FIELDS is both a family portrait and a childhood memoir, set against the vanished world of bamboo huts on spindly timber stilts, a world where one’s prized possessions were makeshift farm tools and a buffalo or two, and where the dead were placed in stone burial jars. Those were the days when removing human heads was a form of sport and the only mode of transport was a pair of good legs.

The author takes you on a fascinating journey into a world seldom seen, to see how the Dusuns in Sabah on the island of Borneo lived at a time when wealth was measured by the amount of rice a farmer harvested and a hardworking sumandak made a more alluring bride than her pretty sister.

Written to preserve some of the old Dusun beliefs and customs, this engaging memoir is a delightful reminiscence of what it was like to be a child growing up in the 1960s when Sabah was still known as British North Borneo.

TINA KISIL was a loner in a brood of twelve. A misfit and a misunderstood child, her shyness often misconstrued as arrogance, she began observing people at a tender age and took refuge in the world of books. Forced to quit school at eighteen to help support her younger siblings through school, she was told by her mother to choose: be a nurse or a teacher. Since blood makes her faint, she chose the latter. After earning her teacher’s diploma, she dedicated the best 35 years of her life to her students. She now lives a quiet life in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, where she catches up on her reading and tries to charm her backyard into a garden. She still seeks refuge in the world of books.

OUT IN PAPERBACK ORIGINAL BY MPH PUBLISHING IN MARCH 2010

Colum McCANN wins the NBA for Fiction

2009-11-19T04:13:00.000-08:00

IRISH AUTHOR Colum McCann has won the 2009 National Book Award for Fiction. The Dublin-born author received the award for his novel, Let the Great World Spin (Random House, 2009), an intricate portrait of New York City and its denizens in the 1970s. McCann is the author of the novels, Zoli, Dancer, This Side of Brightness and Songdogs, as well as two story collections, Everything in this Country Must and Fishing the Sloe-Black River.

It's Kate & Vassanji!

2009-11-18T05:56:00.000-08:00

KATE PULLINGER’s The Mistress of Nothing (McArthur & Co., 2009), the story of a Victorian mistress and her maidservant in the heat and dust of 19th-century Egypt, has won the 2009 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, while the Nonfiction prize went to M.G. Vassanji for his memoir, A Place Within: Rediscovering India (2008), a sensitive and enlightening account of his visits to India over the years.

SU Tong wins the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize

2009-11-17T04:48:00.000-08:00

BEST-SELLING Chinese novelist SU TONG’s The Boat to Redemption (Doubleday, January 2010) has been awarded the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize. The Boat to Redemption is a picaresque, political fable set in a small town in eastern China during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976. It is translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt. Su is the author of Raise the Red Lantern (1991), Rice (1995), My Life as Emperor (2006) and Binu and the Great Wall (2007), and a collection of stories, Madwoman on a Bridge and Other Stories (2008). He is the second Chinese writer to win the three-year-old prize. The first was Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem (Hamish Hamilton, 2008) in 2007, also translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt. Miguel Syjuco won the prize in 2008 with Ilustrado (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, April 2010).

The MPH-Alliance Bank National Short Story Prize 2009 RESULTS

2009-11-16T21:20:00.000-08:00

NOVEMBER 14, 2009: The results of the MPH-Alliance Bank National Short Story Prize 2009 has finally been announced. It has been a long wait, but hopefully one that has been worth the wait!

In the Adult Category, the grand prize was shared between TAN TWAN ENG (for “Some Things Will Remain”), the Man Booker Prize-longlisted author of The Gift of Rain, and newcomer IVAN YEO MUN KIT (for “Clutch, Brake, Sellerator”), an advertising copywriter. The other shortlisted writers are Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize-shortlisted author SHIH-LI KOW (for “Pilling Time”), LEE EELEEN (for “The Englishman at Table 19”), ZED ADAM IDRIS (for “The Hunter and the Tigress”), and VINCENT FOO HIAP KHIAN (for “The Cobra’s Mate”).

In the Teen Category, the grand prize went to EMILY JONG CHAI LI (for “The Old Man”). The other shortlisted writers are CHOSITA CHEEPVASARACH (for “Staying and Leaving”), HOW HAN MING (for “Son of the Jungle”), LIAW LI WEE (for “The Domino Effect”), MUHD MUHAIMIN ZULKARNAIN (for “Complications”), and THAM CHUI-JUN (for “Canned Dreams”).

HEARTIEST CONGRATULATIONS!

PUBLISH YOUR TYPESCRIPT

2009-11-15T05:38:00.000-08:00

MPH PUBLISHING is a small general publisher in Malaysia that publishes short-story collections, novellas, travel, memoirs, essays, health and wellbeing, humour, language, biographies, children’s literature, etc. Our editors are always on the lookout for well-written fiction and nonfiction for the Malaysian and Singapore markets. Specifically, we are looking for authentic voices, especially writers with something relevant and fresh to say. Email your typescripts to mphpublishing@mph.com.my for consideration.

SINGAPORE BOOK CLUB

2009-11-14T15:37:00.000-08:00

REX SHELLEY: THE WRITER AND HIS WORKS
COME JOIN Dr Leong Liew Geok, Shova Loh and Dr David Fedo, as they discuss Singaporean novelist Rex Shelley and his works.

Rex Shelley, trained as an engineer, was a businessman and a former member of the Public Service Commission. He started writing fiction late in life, publishing his first novel, The Shrimp People, in 1991 at 61. It was the first substantial novel on the Eurasian community of Malaysia and Singapore and was a best-selling local paperback in 1991. He went on to write three other novels, forming a quartet of novels documenting the lives and experiences of the Eurasians of Malaya. He passed away on August 21, 2009. He was 78.

Shelley is best known for such works as The Shrimp People (1991: winner of the 1992 National Book Development Council of Singapore Award); People of the Pear Tree (1993: 1994 NBDCS Highly Commended Award); Island in the Centre (1995: 1996 NBDCS Highly Commended Award); and A River of Roses (1998: winner of the 2000 Singapore Literature Prize). He is the winner of the 2007 Singapore Southeast Asia Write Award.

Guest Speaker: Dr Leong Liew Geok
Leong Liew Geok is the author of two collections of poetry, Love is Not Enough and Women without Men. Editor of Ee Tiang Hong’s Responsibility and Commitment: The Poetry of Edwin Thumboo and More than Half the Sky: Creative Writings by Thirty Singaporean Women, she has contributed entries to A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English; Singapore: The Encyclopedia and The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Fiction (forthcoming). She compiled and wrote the English section of the National Arts Council booklet, Literature in Singapore (2007). She taught at the Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore, from 1981 to 2002.

Facilitator: Dr David Fedo
A native of Minnesota and a long-time teacher of literature and college administrator in the US, David Fedo is currently the Executive Director and Visiting Scholar at the Singapore branch of the Wheelock College (Boston, Massachusetts), Center for International Education, Leadership, and Innovation. He has published a collection of poetry, Carrots and Other Poems, and was on a panel at the recent Singapore Writers Festival 2009 which explored the works of contemporary Italian, Singaporean and American poets.

Guest Editor: Shova Loh
Shova Loh is a well-known editor in Singapore who has worked with many writers, including Rex Shelley.

Date: November 20, 2009 (Friday)
Time: 7:00pm
Venue: Earshot Café, The Arts House, 1 Old Parliament Lane, Singapore
Admission is free. To register, please email info@bookcouncil.sg with your contact details. No, you do not need to have read the books before coming, though we certainly hope you will do so after the session. All are welcome.

The Singapore Book Club is jointly organised by the National Book Development Council of Singapore and The Arts House.

Peter CAREY ... Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber, February 2010)

2009-11-13T19:16:00.000-08:00

Olga GRUSHIN ... The Concert Ticket (Viking, March 2010)

2009-11-12T00:40:00.000-08:00

REMEMBER The Dream Life of Sukhanov, the wonderful début by Olga Grushin in 2006? Grushin is back with her second novel, The Concert Ticket (Viking, March 2010). Putnam will be publishing it as The Line in the US in April 2010. An interview with Olga Grushin is forthcoming on this blog.

Linden MACINTYRE scores the Giller!

2009-11-11T05:38:00.000-08:00

AWARD-WINNING broadcast journalist LINDEN MACINTYRE has won the 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize for his second novel, The Bishop’s Man (Random House Canada, July 2009), a story about a conflicted priest who is instructed by the local bishop in Cape Breton to help protect the Catholic Church from a sexual abuse scandal. The Scotiabank Giller Prize is Canada’s most lucrative fiction prize at $50,000. The judges described The Bishop’s Man as a “brave novel, conceived and written with impressive delicacy and understanding.” MacIntyre, whose first novel, The Long Stretch, was published in 1999, is also the author of a 2006 memoir, Causeway: A Passage from Innocence.

Sarah O’REILLY talks to Hilary MANTEL

2009-11-10T16:40:00.000-08:00

2009 Man Booker Prize-winner HILARY MANTEL talks about the process of writing Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate/HarperCollins, 2009) to SARAH O’REILLY

HILARY MANTEL is the author of 10 novels, including Every Day is Mother’s Day, Vacant Possession, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, Fludd, A Place of Greater Safety, A Change of Climate, An Experiment in Love, The Giant, O’Brien, Beyond Black and Wolf Hall; a collection of short stories, Learning to Talk; and a memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. Her new novel, Wolf Hall, is the winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. She lives in England.

What made you a writer, and when did you realise that writing was where your future lay?
I realised quite late in life, as these things go. A lot of people know they’re going to be writers when they’re children, but I made a conscious decision to become one when I was 22, when, because of my poor health, I saw other career prospects slipping away from me. I knew I could write—you couldn’t take the decision otherwise—but what I didn’t know was whether I could write fiction. I didn’t seem to be what people call a ‘natural storyteller’. I had to learn that bit.

How did you first come across Thomas Cromwell, and when did you decide to write about him?
I first came across him when I was a child learning history in a Catholic school. I grew up with the sainted Thomas More looking down from stained-glass windows. As I am a contrarian, it made me ask whether there was more to Cromwell’s story than just his opposition to More, and I carried that question with me. When I began writing, I registered him in my mind as a potential subject. This would have been in the 1970s, before I’d finished my first novel. There seemed to be a lot of blanks in his story, and it wasn’t easy to find out anything about him, but it’s in those gaps that the novelist goes to work.

When you eventually came to write about Cromwell, was there a discovery that helped you to unlock his character?
When I began writing Wolf Hall, it was the arc of Cromwell’s story, the transformation from blacksmith’s son to Earl of Essex, that fascinated me. I wondered, ‘How is that done?’ You’ve got to try to answer that question—it’s the very kind of question that novels are for. But what made me sure that I could work with him, so to speak, was a letter he wrote to a friend in the 1520s, when he was an MP. It is a huge rhetorical description of the course of Parliament and all the business it dealt with, which finishes with a simple, and totally deflationary, line. I paraphrase: ‘And at the end of it, absolutely nothing changed.’ The wry humour in that letter showed me there was a personality that I could write about.

Another thing that drew me was Cromwell’s will, which he wrote towards the end of the 1520s. When you’ve seen somebody’s life so minutely taken apart, when you know who’s going to get his books and who’s going to get his second-best gelding, and you know the names of the people in his household, you become part of that life. You see his daily existence and routine and his whole system of orienting to the world. Seeing the will was like being able to go into Cromwell’s house and take photographs.

How did you find a title?
I liked the idea of a book that was always in progress, right up until its last words. Wolf Hall, the Seymour house in Wiltshire, is where we’re going at the end of the book. But, of course, I chose it primarily for its metaphorical resonance: who could resist it? The whole of Henry’s court is Wolf Hall.

‘Alistair Campbell with an axe’ is one of the less flattering descriptions given to Cromwell by the historian David Starkey. What persuaded you that this unlikely hero not only required, but actually deserved an advocate?
I think Cromwell’s been given a very hard time by writers. In fiction and drama he’s been caricatured as an evil figure in a black cloak, lurking in the wings with dishonourable intentions. In biography he’s missing, because his private life is almost entirely off the record.

David Starkey’s phrase works wonderfully to alert you to Cromwell’s role as a propagandist for Henry, but Cromwell was a lot more subtle than Alistair Campbell—or at least, more subtle than the popular picture of Alistair Campbell suggests. Cromwell didn’t deploy his heavy artillery unless he needed to. He was a persuader and a negotiator and, to a degree, a compromiser.

I think the picture darkened with the Victorians. Cromwell’s image hasn’t always been bad: in Elizabethan legend and literature he was a hero, but to the Victorians he presented a problem. He wasn’t a varsity man. Historians couldn’t get their heads around the idea of a member of the lower orders rising so high in the hierarchy. There was also a sentimentality about the medieval world, with Cromwell seen as one of its destroyers. This idea persists today.

How did you tackle the challenge of writing about a period of history that is so familiar to modern readers? And why did you choose to do so in the present tense?
The Tudors are the great national soap opera; their story has been worked over so extensively that we see it as having a kind of inevitable, predetermined quality about it, so I needed to find a way of telling the story that would create an immediacy of viewpoint and cancel out the preconceptions we were brought up with. In writing the opening scene, of the boy being beaten up by his father, I was simply launched into the present tense. And I stayed with it because it was a way for me to capture the soundtrack inside Cromwell’s head—the immediacy of his experience. Also, though we may know how it all ends, Henry and his court didn’t. They didn’t know that the War of the Roses had ended; because the Tudor claim was weak, they dreaded that civil war might break out again. Henry didn’t know he would have six wives—even when he married number five, he couldn’t have known it. The present tense forbids hindsight and propels us forward through this world, making it new, just as it was, in every unfolding moment, for the players.

How did you go about finding a voice for Cromwell and getting under his skin?
Because they were so often dictated, letters, personal or impersonal, can give you a sense of the rhythm and vocabulary of the character’s spoken voice, and hence their mode of thought. So you look at those, and you look at what other people have said about your character.

The main person who tells us about Cromwell is the Spanish Imperial Ambassador, Chapuys, who was his enemy, but he was also his neighbour in the city and someone whom Cromwell saw a great deal of. Chapuys was a very astute observer. He tells us about how, when you were talking to Cromwell, he would fasten his eyes on your face, to calculate minutely the effect his words were having on you. He also paints a portrait of Cromwell as a very open-handed, generous, affable host, a man with whom it was wonderful to have a conversation.

Can you talk a little about what it’s been like to live with a character like Cromwell during the writing of this book?
There’s huge exhilaration in following a career like this, charting someone’s rise and rise. I do think without doubt that you become completely involved: someone of Cromwell’s strength and optimism can’t help but get into you. But the downside of it is that sooner or later your character will fall from the heights. Living with Cromwell has been a good experience so far, but you’ll have to ask me again when I’ve executed him.

Near the end of the novel you write: ‘It’s the living that turn and chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust in their rattling mouths. We edit their writings, we rewrite their lives.’ How much of a responsibility do you feel towards your historical characters, who have had an existence independent of your imagination, when you pin them to the page?
In the lines you’ve just quoted, I am holding up my hands and saying to readers, you might think that what I’m doing in this book is dubious—it might even be thought reprehensible—yet we can’t help but reimagine the past; we have no choice. It is part of us, and we must acknowledge that it is we who reimagine it, we in the present moment, who can’t help but project our own insights and preoccupations backwards.

I think this creates a responsibility for the writer. I feel research must be as good as I can possibly make it, and guesses should be made only where there are no facts to be had. They must be plausible. Where gaps occur, the way you fill them must offer a possible version. I owe these characters as much scholarship as I can contrive, and all my care to try to get them right.

I should also say that it’s immensely rewarding to feel that you have, perhaps, succeeded in reanimating someone. There is a kind of magic moment where you feel your characters are really speaking, and you don’t have to think about their dialogue any more. I found that very early in this book, particularly with Thomas Wolsey. As soon as he began to speak, I felt that my job was simply to take down what he said, like a secretary. There is a peculiar pleasure to be had in feeling that you’ve brought someone back to life in that way.

You’ve written in a number of forms—short story, memoir, the contemporary and historical novel. Have any of these had a bearing on the composition of Wolf Hall?
Looking back, I think that writing my memoir was a kind of training ground for future novels, and something that was good for me as a writer. There are people who insist that almost all your memories of childhood are later reconstructions, but what I found when writing my memoir was that my childhood rose before me as an utter sensory wraparound, so that I was able to inhabit my past, and my work was to simply describe it. When you write fiction, the object is to achieve that on behalf of a character that you’ve invented or a person who is dead. I don’t think I’ve ever managed to do it as successfully, in fiction, as I have in Wolf Hall.

What I also found when writing Giving Up the Ghost was that whilst I could capture the entirety of my childhood experiences, I often couldn’t tell the reader why things happened, or how the event I was describing linked to another, and I think I carried this discovery into Wolf Hall. When Cromwell remembers an incident from his childhood—for example, he recalls plunging the head of another boy into a butt of water—he has no idea why he did it, and I knew from my own experience that these gaps and holes are part of the texture of memory. In this book I was determined to reproduce a life from the inside. I thought, ‘Let us try to see a man in his full complexity. Even if there are bits that he himself doesn’t understand and can’t add up, let me still include them, because that’s the experience of being alive.’

Can you describe your mood on launching into the Tudor period once more for the follow-up to Wolf Hall?
Exhilaration. I’m longing to be back in the thick of the action. Partly it’s because I want to know what’s going to happen next. When I write, there are often times when I go into a scene not quite sure what I think, knowing that the problem I have to solve revolves around one question, ‘How did this happen?’ And by the end of the scene I have an answer, because it’s happened on the page. So I am looking forward to getting back to those puzzles in the new book. Also, I’ve been so heartened by the way in which Wolf Hall has been received. There’s always the danger with historical fiction that it may fall short as both literature and history. I knew when I took on this project that it was going to be a very difficult thing to do. But, ha! Who’s interested in what’s easy?

Hilary Mantel is working on The Mirror and the Light, the sequel to Wolf Hall

Kim BARNES ... A Country Called Home (Knopf Doubleday, 2008)

2009-11-09T16:58:00.000-08:00

KIM BARNES is a Moscow, Idaho-based novelist and memoirist who teaches writing at the University of Idaho. She is the author of the novel, Finding Caruso, and two memoirs, In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country—a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—and Hungry for the World. Barnes’s second novel, A Country Called Home, was published in 2008 and has just come out in paperback.

Between the Covers

2009-11-08T19:26:00.000-08:00

Fans queued up to meet writers and artists at a festival aimed at stirring fuzzy feelings.

By TAN MAY LEE

NEIL GAIMAN was there. That made a legion of Coraline fans swarm the Singapore Writers Festival (SWF) 2009. Many clutched Gaiman’s latest fantasy/horror novel and his famous Sandman graphic novels. They formed a queue that stretched all the way outside The Arts House, the luminous white colonial building by the picturesque Parliament House and Singapore River.

According to Phan Ming Yen, the Arts House assistant general manager, “We are still putting the numbers together but the feel, especially from the long queues for Neil Gaiman, is that we may achieve, or at least will be close to achieving, our target of 25,000 visitors (for the entire festival). However, a festival is not just about numbers but also the quality of the discussions and exchanges held,” Phan adds.

Sadly, I missed Gaiman’s event. The SWF was held from October 24 to November 1, but I had to leave Singapore before he appeared on Halloween.

Fortunately during the first weekend, I ran into three other big names who demonstrated the popularity of comics and graphic novels over the wordier books.

In the Chamber room, where parliamentary debates used to take place, a sizeable audience—some armed with camcorders—gathered to see Mark Waid of Kingdom Come and Superman: Birthright fame; Sonny Liew, the Malaysian-born artist who broke into DC Vertigo, Marvel, and Disney; and Lat, who spoke “on behalf of the older generation, as I was famous in the last century.”

After the event, aptly called “Comics: A Timeless Narrative,” fans formed a queue across the corridor. Singaporean author, Wena Poon (the author of Lions in Winter, who launched her second collection of stories, The Proper Care of Foxes, at the festival), was the first in line to meet Lat. As the renowned Malaysian artist effortlessly doodled his trademark grinning, mop-haired character beside his autograph, she exclaimed how she grew up reading his comics and how he looked exactly like his cartoon.

SWF commanded the attention of Lat, and Malaysia’s distinguished writers—Wong Phui Nam, K.S. Maniam, newly-named National Laureate Anwar Ridhwan, and Baha Zain. They are the generation of writers who worry that—in Wong’s words at a pre-festival press conference—“In 10, 20 years’ time, Malaysian writing in English will be an adjunct to Singapore writing.”

The theme of the 13th instalment of the festival was UNderCovers. In his speech at the opening ceremony, Lui Tuck Yew, Acting Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts, explained: “It is about thrills and mystery, the warm and fuzzy feeling when you get under the covers and indulge in a good read, or when once forgotten or silent histories or narratives are uncovered.”

UNderCovers thus offered a diverse range of authors. In the first half alone, hip-hop poet Omar Musa (whose father is poet Musa Masran) performed from his poetry collection, The Clocks, with pieces exploring his Australian-Malaysian heritage.

The 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize winner Miguel Syjuco spoke about writing “liberating” fiction. The Filipino writer’s debut novel, Ilustrado, will be released in May 2010.

Singapore’s O Thiam Chin, who recently released his short-story collection, Never Been Better, made his first solo author appearance. Shamini Flint, a Malaysian who lives in Singapore, launched another title in her Inspector Singh Investigates series of crime fiction, A Bali Conspiracy Most Foul. At the full-house event held in the festival’s cafe, Earshot, Flint announced that her UK publisher, Little, Brown, has signed her for another two titles.

Aside from listening to soulful readings and admiring the festival bookstore’s collection of hard-to-find titles (the store, BooksActually, looks like a gallery of books instead of the usual rows of shelves), visitors were also treated to special performances and film screenings.

One of the most moving films was The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, a movie adaptation of John Boyne’s best-selling novel on the Holocaust, which delved into the unlikely friendship between a German boy and a Jewish boy. The Irish author was also at the festival to talk about his latest novel, The House of Special Purpose, set against the landscape of Russia this time.

The SWF is held biennially. Although there is talk that the joy of reading literature is also dying among Singaporeans, the National Arts Council has been sustaining the literary arts scene since 1991.

“The festival strengthened its role as a platform for new Singapore and Asian writing and made Singaporeans more aware of our writing in the four languages (English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil), and our connections and place in Asia,” says Khor Kok Wah, deputy CEO of the Council.

Reproduced from The Sunday Star of November 8, 2009

Wena POON ... Lions in Winter (Salt Publishing, September 2009)

2009-11-07T16:42:00.000-08:00

WENA POON’s Lions in Winter, first published by MPH Publishing in 2007, is now published by Salt Publishing in the UK. Her second collection, The Proper Care of Foxes, was recently published by Ethos Books in Singapore.

Five million English-speaking Chinese, Indians and Malays live in Singapore today—an artificial port city created entirely by British traders in the 19th century. The Singapore-born, multi-lingual American writer Wena Poon describes herself and her fiction as an ‘accident of history.’ She charts the 21st-century journey of Singaporeans as they settle in the cities of New York, Los Angeles, London, Perth and Toronto. In Lions in Winter, Poon captures the true urban sophistication of New Asia and the journey of an eclectic people coming to terms with their cultural legacy.

Joshua FERRIS ... The Unnamed (Little, Brown, January 2010)

2009-11-06T05:18:00.000-08:00

Nam LE triumphs again!

2009-11-05T04:39:00.000-08:00

AUSTRALIAN Nam Le’s début collection of short stories, The Boat, has triumphed, again, over the cream of Australia’s novelists to win the 2009 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction. The fiction shortlist includes such firm favourites as Murray Bail, Geraldine Brooks, Richard Flanagan, Peter Goldsworthy and Joan London.

The Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction at A$100,000 is Australia’s richest literary award for fiction. It was established by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in 2008 to celebrate the contribution of Australian literature to the nation’s cultural and intellectual life. Le is the second début author to win the fiction award, after Steven Conte’s first novel, The Zookeeper’s War, won the inaugural award in 2008.

The Boat also won the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2008.

Andrea LEVY ... The Long Song (Headline Review, February 2010)

2009-11-04T14:03:00.000-08:00

ANDREA LEVY, the best-selling and critically acclaimed author of the Orange Prize- and Whitbread Prize-winning novel, Small Islands, will be back with a new novel in February 2010. Her new novel, The Long Song, the story of July, born a slave on a Jamaican sugar-cane plantation in the 19th century, will be published under the Headline Review imprint. The book will be published in February 2010 by Headline Review in the UK, and in early 2010 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US and Hamish Hamilton in Canada.

30th Anniversary Editions

2009-11-03T05:55:00.000-08:00

1. Kane and Abel (1979) / Jeffrey Archer
2. A Woman of Substance (1979) / Barbara Taylor Bradford

THE WRITING LIFE ... John BOYNE

2009-11-02T22:41:00.000-08:00

THE PURPOSE-DRIVEN AUTHOR
TAN MAY LEE talks to JOHN BOYNE about the worldwide success of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which sold over five million copies worldwide, and the anticipation of his latest novel, The House of Special Purpose

“ALL I EVER WANTED was to be allowed to continue to write and for someone to publish my books.” For the longest time, John Boyne knew he wanted to be an author. He received his solid grounding in English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin, and developed his creative writing skills at the University of East Anglia. He says, “The best writing courses provide an atmosphere of encouragement for a group of aspiring writers and allow them to work at their own pace and then take part in group discussions where all the good and bad elements of their writing are discussed. If they work right, then the student should feel empowered and ready to grow as a writer. Any writer wants readers and for students, this is the best way to get some.” Boyne also worked at Waterstone’s, the UK’s leading bookseller, and other bookstores, so retail and bookselling is all familiar to him, too. Despite knowing the ins and outs of the book industry, and having literary qualifications behind him, he still struggled with his first three novels (The Thief of Time, The Congress of Rough Riders and Crippen) for years before his big break with The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which won him two Irish book awards.

Boyne’s seventh and latest novel is The House of Special Purpose. The Irish Times says, “Boyne’s novel ... is a work that chimes perfectly with our times.” It is set in Russia during World War I—1915, tracing the fate of 16-year-old Georgy Jachmenev, who one day steps in front of an assassin’s bullet intended for the heart of a senior member of the Russian Imperial Family. From being the son of a peasant farmer, Georgy becomes an overnight hero and goes to St. Petersburg to be the bodyguard to Alexei Romanov, the only son of Tsar Nicholas II.

“I travelled to St. Petersburg while I was writing the first draft [of the novel] in order to get a sense of the city,” Boyne says. In his book, he captures the historic times before Moscow took over St. Petersburg as the capital of Russia after two hundred years. One of the historic places he explored is the Winter Palace, which was the official residence of the Russian tsars before the 1917 storming of the palace during the Russian Revolution. Much of the novel takes place there. Today, the Winter Palace houses the Hermitage Museum, which is open to the public “so I was able to spend time in the various rooms and try to get the ghosts of the Imperial family to suffuse onto the page.” For research, Boyne read “nonfiction accounts of the fall of the Romanov dynasty, the lives of Tsar Nicholas and the Empress Alexandra, as well as that of the monk Grigori Rasputin.”

As for the protagonist Georgy, Boyne says he was not inspired by a specific person, but he’s aware that “a lot of the heroes of my fiction tend to be ill-educated boys who find themselves in extraordinary situations.” It was significant for Georgy to be a librarian, too (at the British Museum, no less), as Boyne often has his heroes befriend a mentor who brings them to the world of learning, particularly that of books. “I came to books quite early myself and a part of me is in each of these characters but they certainly have far more exciting adventures than I had at that age!” he says. In 2008, his novel Mutiny: A Novel of the Bounty (or Mutiny on the Bounty) begins with its 14-year-old protagonist lurking around bookstalls to steal from a French gentleman, who later rescues him from being sent to prison.

The House of Special Purpose took Boyne 18 months to create from start to finish, the average time he takes for writing his novels. Although a diligent and consistent writer, his most famous novel for children, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, saw its draft manuscript completed in a week; in fact, Boyne reportedly wrote the entire book in two and a half days. “When I was writing it, the story certainly took me over entirely and I was absolutely concerned with the characters and the plot.” Boyne had been a serious student of Holocaust-related literature for about 15 years and this gave him the background of the Germans and Nazi concentration camps, with which he came up with the premise of Bruno, the son of a Nazi, who innocently and ill-fatedly befriends Shmuel, a Jew in a concentration camp.

“Of course, I spent the best part of a year then rewriting the novel and making serious decisions about which facts of the camps would remain intact and which I would change,” Boyne says. After it was published, the book went on to sell over five million copies and dominated best-seller lists worldwide, including The New York Times. It was also made into an award-winning Miramax feature film, directed by Mark Herman.

Despite his success, Boyne remains grounded when it comes to writing. “It’s not always smooth sailing,” he admits, “but I certainly feel confident that I know how to construct a novel and create interesting characters.

“I’m unlikely to start something and then abandon it. Once I’ve begun writing I’m very focused and very disciplined, particularly during the writing of a first draft, when I devote myself entirely to the story.” His daily routine begins at 7:30a.m. and he works on his new book until lunchtime. He does his editing and other work in the afternoons. “I try to write new fiction seven days a week,” the diligent author says.

For Boyne, a typical manuscript would have gone through about 10 drafts. “I write on the computer, print it out, write my changes all over the manuscript, feed those changes in and print again, allowing the process to continue until I have a script that has no red marks on it.” The rewriting is where the novel takes shape. “I see a first draft as a block of stone and somewhere inside it is a story trying to escape. You have to chip away until it makes some sense.

“I’m working on a new children’s book at the moment and it’s already up to the ninth draft!”

Curiously, the Dublin-born author has never set a novel in his homeland. “I seem to look abroad for inspiration in my writing,” Boyne admits. “I certainly want to write a novel set in Ireland one day, but I’ve decided not to do that until I have a good story to tell. At the moment I just don’t have one! But I’ll keep trying to find one.”

For now, Boyne is contented with his success and inspiration from other countries to fuel his creative imaginings. He also enjoys the perks of being invited to literary festivals around the world and has been invited to speak in the Netherlands, Germany, Portugal, Britain, Australia and now, Singapore. “At the moment I know very little about Singapore but I plan on reading about it in advance—probably some contemporary writers, too—and I’m certainly going to make time to do a little exploration of my own. Perhaps it will show up in a future novel then!” he says good-humouredly. He describes himself as a voracious reader and tries to keep up with all the new novels every month by writers he admires as well as keeping an eye out for interesting débuts. Currently, he’s reading Glen David Gold’s new novel, Sunnyside.

One of the more affable and livelier authors, Boyne enjoys author appearances and book tours: “I quite like promoting books. I spent a lot of time alone in my study writing, so when I get the opportunity to travel and talk at festivals, such as the one in Singapore, it’s a great delight.” He even spoke at the Aberdeen Word Festival, defending the tradition of paperbacks that it would never lose out to “novels on computer screens.”

“It’s convenient to have all your music on one electronic storage system but books will always need to be printed.”

Even after seven books, Boyne believes there’s still more to come: “I’m still a young writer and I hope I have a lot of novels in my future and it’s important to me that I continue to have a large readership as I grow older.”

TAN MAY LEE graduated from the University of Leeds, United Kingdom, where she was awarded the Bonamy Dobree Scholarship for International Students to do her Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Language. She also trained as a Master Practitioner in Neuro-Semantics Neuro-Linguistic Programming. She is the editor of Quill magazine.

Reproduced from the special Singapore Writers Festival 2009 issue of Quill magazine

November 2009 Highlights

2009-11-01T05:07:00.000-08:00

Novels
1. Invisible (Faber & Faber, 2009) / Paul Auster
2. The Story of Danny Dunn (Viking/Penguin Australia, 2009) / Bryce Courtenay
3. Truth or Fiction (Headline Review, 2009) / Jennifer Johnston
4. The Lacuna (Faber & Faber, 2009) / Barbara Kingsolver
5. The Art Student’s War (Knopf Doubleday, 2009) / Brad Leithauser
6. Lovesong (Allen & Unwin, 2009) / Alex Miller
7. Too Much Happiness (Knopf Doubleday, 2009) / Alice Munro
8. The Original of Laura (Penguin, 2009) / Vladmir Nabokov
9. The Humbling (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009) / Philip Roth
10. New York (Knopf Doubleday, 2009) / Edward Rutherfurd
11. A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta (Hamish Hamilton, 2009) / Paul Theroux
12. The Book of the Alchemist (Hodder & Stoughton, 2009) / Adam Williams

Stories
1. Ford County (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) / John Grisham
2. A Good Fall (Pantheon/Knopf Doubleday, 2009) / Ha Jin
3. The Collected Stories (Penguin, 2009) / William Trevor
4. Look at the Birdie (Delacorte Press, 2009) / Kurt Vonnegut

Poetry
1. Leavings (Counterpoint, 2009) / Wendell Berry

Nonfiction
1. Life Class: The Selected Memoirs of Diana Athill (Granta Books, 2009) / Diana Athill
2. Short Circuit: A Guide to the Art of the Short Story (Salt Publishing, 2009) / Vanessa Gebbie
3. Lit: A Memoir (HarperCollins, 2009) / Mar Karr
4. Concerning E.M. Forster (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009) / Frank Kermode
5. Bury Place Papers: Essays form the London Review of Books (London Review of Books, 2009) / Frank Kermode
6. Family Britain, 1951-1957 (Bloomsbury, 2009) / David Kynaston
7. Yours Ever: People and Their Letters (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) / Thomas Mallon
8. Contact! (Faber & Faber, 2009) / Jan Morris
9. Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life (Simon & Schuster, 2009) / Carol Sklenicka
10. Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing (Yale University Press, 2009) / Michael Slater
11. Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (Penguin/Hamish Hamilton, 2009) / Zadie Smith
12. Memoir: A History (Penguin Group USA, 2009) / Ben Yagoda

THE WRITING LIFE ... John Ajvide LINDQVIST

2009-10-31T16:34:00.000-07:00

SWEDISH HORROR
JOHN AJVIDE LINDQVIST thrilled Swedish readers with his 2004 début on the social aspects of a vampire, Let the Right One In. Come 2010, there will be an English remake of the film adaptation, and with more horror stories under his sleeve, this Swedish writer is set to thrill and chill more fans. TAN MAY LEE finds out more about his spooks

JOHN AJVIDE LINDQVIST has, without a doubt, the most interesting and unconventional CV you would ever come across. He worked as a magician and stand-up comedian before dabbling in horror stories. Let the Right One In was his début novel about the much-bullied 12-year-old schoolboy Oskar who befriends his next-door neighbour, Eli, a 200-year-old vampire. It became a Swedish best-seller and was later translated into other languages and adapted as a film. Director Matt Reeves will release an English remake of the critically-acclaimed movie in 2010. For now, this year sees the English translation of Handling the Undead, tackling undeads that have risen from Stockholm’s city morgue.

When you were growing up, did you feel destined for an unconventional career route?
I was 12 when I seriously started aiming at becoming a magician, and I suppose that is unconventional.

You were a magician, a stand-up comedian, and now, a horror writer. How do you juggle this very fascinating combination?
Performing magic tricks and writing are both basically about teaching yourself a technique for making the impossible believable. Comedy and horror aren’t so different either. It’s about creating and describing an everyday situation in which you place something abnormal, something which sheds a different light on the situation, be it horrific or amusing.

What kind of research goes into your writing?
Very little. I tend to try to write about things I already know. For my second novel Handling the Undead, I had to visit a morgue but that was the greatest length I have gone to for research.

Your début novel, Let the Right One In, was set in the Stockholm suburb of Blackeberg, where you grew up in. How would you describe Blackeberg to a traveller today?
My mother still lives there, so I go there every now and then. It is quite a nice, quiet suburb in Stockholm with lots of greenery and forests around it. Nothing threatening there ... anymore.

Although you write in the horror genre, there were universal issues tackled, such as the superior and the bullied; divides between rich and poor. Would you say these are the issues that will move readers to sympathise with the characters in all genres—whether horror, sci-fi, or fantasy?
For me, quite a lot of horror fails when it doesn’t make me care about the people to whom the terrible things are going to happen. Someone you don’t care about can be slaughtered with a chainsaw in a story and you don’t give a damn. Then someone you really care for steps on a nail and it hurts your own body. As for social or psychosocial comment, I find this to be an essential part of any story, otherwise you simply don’t take an interest, or you have bad taste in your mouth once the story is finished.

Is this your first trip to Singapore? What are you looking forward to experiencing at the Singapore Writers Festival?
Yes, this is my first trip to Singapore. I look forward to seeing how Singaporeans do things in a culture which I imagine to be quite different from my own. I am, for example, a smoker, and I realise that this can be something of a problem. Also, I am quite fond of skyscrapers.

This year’s theme for the Singapore Writers Festival is UnderCovers, aiming to promote alternative literature. Do you consider your books an alternative form of literature with a cult following?
I don’t consider my own writing to be alternative in any way, since I aim for readability. Only my subject matters can be considered “alternative.” And maybe the deep seriousness in which I write about absurd subjects. As far as a “cult following” I don’t see much of that. I live in the countryside, sit in my little house and make up my stories. I don’t go out much and do very few readings.

In Asia, we have our own versions of vampires and ghosts. European superstitions can be pretty new and foreign. Although you personally do not believe that any of the creatures in your books really exist, what are the Swedish beliefs in the supernatural that have been ingrained in your culture?
The best short story I have ever written is about trolls, and in my latest novel there is someting called a “spiritus,” a sort of magical insect that gives its owner supernatural abilities—both trolls and spirituses are taken from Swedish mythology. I tend to mix elements of Swedish folklore with more mainstream horror elements, such as zombies or vampires. But mostly I just write about people confronted with something they don’t have the mental tools to deal with—things from the other side. And I think this is a universal theme.

Could you recommend some Swedish literature to foreign readers?
Always start out with Selma Lagerlöf (the first woman to ever win the Nobel Prize for Literature). Move on with Hjalmar Söderberg. For poetry, go for Tomas Tranströmer. If you want something more modern, try Kerstin Ekman. Sorry that so many of the names contain the letter “ö.”

Outside the world of horror and books, what interests you?
I like Abba, romantic comedies, Singstar and Guitar Hero. I do watch horror movies when something good comes out, but it so seldom does. I also look forward to playing Resident Evil 5. Otherwise my main interest in life is my wife and son.

What do you think of popular culture?
What a question! Well, my answer to the former question does give away that I prefer popular culture to that other, distant culture. I don’t really know what that is. I am a great fan of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Samuel Beckett. But they are also part of popular culture, aren’t they?

Do you travel widely on book tours and personally trips?
No. I have too many things that I want to write about, and I simply don’t have the time. Also, I only go to other countries when it’s possible to bring my family and when it’s possible for them to come. Singapore was irresistible, though.

Now that you have seen film adaptations of your work, has it made you more interested in screenwriting and films?
I have already written the script for Handling the Undead and it’s due to start shooting next summer. Tomas Alfredson and I also plan to work together on my third novel, as we worked together on Let the Right One In. I hope I can continue writing the screenplays of my own books, as long as people let me.

How far along are you on your new novel?
I’m at the moment on page 420 of Little Star, which has unfortunately turned out a little too horrific. I have only something like 50 pages to go, but then quite the tedious process of cutting the novel down to 400 pages will begin. I started out thinking I was writing a 200-page book, but it’s always like that with me.

Reproduced from the Singapore Writers Festival 2009 issue of Quill magazine

THE WRITING LIFE ... Muhammad HAJI SALLEH

2009-10-30T17:51:00.000-07:00

JEWEL OF THE VERBAL ARTS
Malaysia’s National Laureate MUHAMMAD HAJI SALLEH recounts the evolution of modern literature to TAN MAY LEE

IF YOU STUDIED ENGLISH LITERATURE for SPM (Malaysia’s equivalent of the British O Levels), you might have come across the poetry of Muhammad Haji Salleh. Unlike the English fascination with daffodils and autumn leaves dancing in the breeze, Muhammad’s reflections of padi fields and serene kampung [village] life would appear out of the usual round of things, yet at the heart of it, completely familiar, even nostalgic. He writes on Malaysian life and also champions the Malay language.

Currently, he is with the Centre for Policy Research and International Studies at Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang. He recently completed a translation of Hikayat Hang Tuah (The Legends of Hang Tuah) and the Anthology of Classical Malay Literature and hopes to publish three books he is editing in 2010. He also writes two monthly columns in the literary and cultural journals of Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP). His has been a lifelong dedication to the arts; and because of that Muhammad has played a significant role in developing the Malaysian literary landscape.

You have been a writer throughout your life. Has your writing journey taught you more about yourself?
Literature is at the heart of a culture, and a person without a culture has neither heart nor soul, however profitable or efficient their factories may be. They may turn out to be the machines they manage. Language is wonderful, and poetry is the jewel of the verbal arts. Writing is a talent that is given to everyone, and every nation has its own words for its own particular experiences. Personally, I, too, am part of a bigger community and language. But I think I can contribute to them in my small way.

As Malaysia’s National Laureate, you are often invited to become a Fellow at universities around the world. Do you enjoy these appointments?
I have been invited as a Fellow a few times, at universities in Berkeley, Michigan, Kyoto and Harvard. These are exclusive time when I can research and write without other demands. I get to meet and listen to renowned scholars, and camp in the best libraries.

As a poet, I get to meet famous authors and offer my perspective on issues. I often give talks and poetry readings during these stints. It helps put Malaysian literature on the map.

How often do you travel?
Quite often. Frequently to take up fellowships, embark on research, present papers and sometimes not-so-successful holidays. My life cycle is only two weeks long. After this period I must get out and go somewhere, if not overseas then to Kedah, southern Thailand or back to my house in Kajang, the town that smells of satay.

I notice that many internationally-acclaimed Malaysian authors (Tash Aw, Rani Manicka, Preeta Samarasan, Tan Twan Eng and Chiew-Siah Tei) are based overseas. Should Malaysian writers try to stay in their homeland or would you encourage them to explore so as to be observers outside looking in?
I do both: live overseas for periods of time, then return home. It’s a shared world now. Themes, languages and styles are shared. It matters not where a writer lives. Nobel laureate J.M.G. le Clézio lived in Africa, Europe and other places.

What are your best memories of places in Malaysia that have inspired your writing?
My memory is historical and also personal. For the historical, I dig deep into old texts like the Malay Annals, Hikayat Hang Tuah (The Legend of Hang Tuah), pantuns (Malay poems) and proverbs.

The personal ones mostly come from my youth in Penang—in Sungai Acheh, Bukit Mertajam and Seberang Perai. However my travels to Belum in Perak, Kuala Tembeling in Pahang, Semporna in Sabah, and Perhentian and Redang Islands are just as beautiful. I like nature in its most pristine state—these give me an exhilaration and poetic inspiration. There is a proverb: “If you want know about human beings, go deep into the forest.”

As a lecturer, you are used to presenting talks on literature to large audiences. When it comes to your own poetry, which can be quite personal, how much do you enjoy performing them? You once mentioned in another interview that you were a shy person and that’s why you were drawn to poetry. Today, poetry appears to be one of the most outspoken forms of literature. What are your views on this?
My poems have two faces: the quiet internal one with a personal face and fare, and also the external and public one. These represent the two sides of my own life. I do enjoy reading to an appreciative audience. Sadly, these types of audiences are quite rare in Malaysia. People tend to be engaging in extended conversation or political discussions when poets are reading here. My poems are fragile, and so are my moods for reading poetry. I am often distracted by these parallel presentations by members of my audience. And I go home quite depressed.

Some people today have it in their heads that they should write for money and not out of passion. Where does this mindset come from?
Unfortunately, we have been taught that the end result of education is money, and money is the stuff and matter of life. This is indeed tragic; we should make literature and the arts compulsory before all our future generations become wage slaves and moneybags. Our education system has created a few generations of unimaginative and quite illiterate young people—somehow the essence of life and education are missed but the junk and the rubbish are the ones that people go for.

The joy of life and education, too, is no longer around—what’s left are heavy, unwieldy schoolbags and drudgery. We need to teach our young that it is all right to think and have an opinion, and evaluate their own situations without quoting the newspapers or the ministers. To reverse this mindset, we have to reverse our education goals and systems. I am pushing for literature to be taught to all students—as they do in Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English schools all around the world.

You have obviously witnessed the development of Malaysian literature over the decades. How has it evolved?
I think Malaysian literature is evolving slower than Indonesian or Filipino literature. We tend to shove it to the sidelines of Malaysian life. Luckily, there are some good talents like Wong Phui Nam, Baha Zain and Latiff Mohidin. There are also young non-Malay writers, especially from Sabah and Sarawak, besides those from the Peninsula. They are foregrounding their own communal experiences which have been under wraps for a long time. This is good. They also bring to the national language unique qualities of their own languages or dialects. Multicultural Malaysian literature is alive and kicking.

For awhile, you consciously chose to write primarily in Malay. Do you find that the level of Bahasa Malaysia is dropping or improving? Now that English, Chinese and French have taken over as the global languages of communication, what do you foresee as the future of the Malay language?
I took a long time to come to that decision of writing in Malay. We are all trustees of the language of our ancestors or of our country. English, though now an international language, was a colonial one that allowed little space for Malay to grow or maintain the prestige it had throughout the Malay Archipelago for almost two millennia. During the colonial years I was told that only English was the language of knowledge. But Malaysian language has a long history, from the times and kingdoms of the Srivijaya, Malacca and Acheh.

Generally, I think the Malay language is now more sophisticated; however, this sophistication is limited to a few people. The general public is not very sensitive to the beauty of the language or its uniqueness and see it only as a means of (rough) communication. This is a worrying scenario. But there is a study that says in 30 years, Malay (and Indonesian) will share the fourth place among the languages of the world with Hindi and Arab in terms of the number of speakers. With Malay returning to schools now, we may still catch up with the other languages.

What literary aspect of Malay do people tend to miss out on that stops them from appreciating the language more? For someone new to Malay literature, what should they start reading?
People tend to come to the language with huge prejudices, not least created by English. This is the biggest hurdle. If one lets oneself go, one would find the collective genius of the pantun and the proverbs. The pantun is used in at least 40 languages worldwide, and our proverbs are as wise as any. One can start with the short stories of Keris Mas and the poems of Usman Awang. Then venture into the more international styles of Baha Zain and Latiff Mohidin.

As a bilingual writer, what can you convey in Malay that you can’t effectively do in English and vice versa?
A nation’s dream, and nostalgia in a language that smells of childhood, passage and growing up. The smell of flowers don’t seem to be the same if you use their English terms—somehow frangipani is not cempaka, water lily is not seroja. How do you describe the heavenly smell of the petai or the durian if other people insist that they are smelly or have an odour of cottage cheese? Many culture-specific words like keris, Peranakan, mee udang or laksa barely bring over their shape or looks but not their connotations and cultural meanings. Then the music of Malay is different from that of English—it’s more gentle, more emotive and decorous. You must have music and decorum to give your poems a fuller life in Malay.

Just curious—have you always wanted to be a writer?
My father told me that as a young boy I wanted to be a teacher. But I never wanted to be a headmaster, politician or businessman. In those days, there weren’t many choices. So I became a teacher, and stayed as one for almost 45 years! This is a job where you work for others—a generation’s future. When you are successful you can feel it at the end of the class or lecture. There is more light shining in the students’ eyes.

I never had idols to emulate in the 1950s. But when I was in the upper secondary school, I realised that being a writer could be quite glamorous—you are studied for your ideas, language and style. It was in England in the 1960s that I read the works of famous writers like T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and Dylan Thomas. Somehow their dreams of writing as a career were unsullied by expectations of money. So I read their works and biographies, and wanted to be like them.

Literature now also depends on its marketability. In your opinion, will literature be consumed by commercialism one day?
It is being devoured by predatory capitalism now. The really good works that don’t follow the tastes (oftentimes superficial) do not sell well, and those that sell well do so often not because of their ideas or verbal quality. People like Kenzaburō Ōe, who writes about special children, are resigned to the idea that good literature will not die, but will only circulate among the chosen few.

Reproduced from the Singapore Writers Festival 2009 issue of Quill magazine