Malaysian Writing in World Literature Today


I'm flattered to be mentioned in Dipika Mukherjee's article about Malaysian English Writing featured in World Literature Today 


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Marc

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Book review - The Sum of Our Follies by Shih-Li Kow

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Since learning that Malaysian writer Shih-Li Kow’s collection of short stories – Ripple and Other Stories - was shortlisted for the 2009 Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize, coming ahead of collections by prestigious authors like Ali Smith and Kazuo Ishiguro among others, I’ve been meaning to get around to reading her work.

In the mean time she wrote her first novel, The Sum of Our Follies, which has been translated into French (by a blind man) and Italian, and also won the French 2018 Prix du Premier Roman étranger.

Last November I met the writer herself in person at the George Town Literary Festival and I had to confess that to my shame that beyond a single short story published in a collection of Malaysian writing I still hadn’t read any of her work. This obviously needed to be remedied, so I bought both of her books at Gerakbudaya’s new bookshop in Hikayat on George Town’s Beach Street.

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Two stories in Telltale Food

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It's an honour to have two pieces featured in Telltale Food, an anthology of food writing that was launched last week at the 2019 George Town Literary Festival.

The collection covers three years and shares many of the submissions for the Fay Khoo award. 

One of my stories included is called Escargots de Bourgogne and relates the pitfalls of assuming too much, whether in cooking or life, and is based on a period I spent on a tiny farm in Burgundy more than thirty years ago.

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