- Hillary Kelly butts up against Haruki Murakami’s latest collection First Person Singular, reviewed in the Los Angeles Times. (1 April) … Rob Doyle at The Guardian is a little kinder, but not by much. (12 April)
- A 1-hour podcast from Kuzhali Manickavel on writing English in India, plus a short story she discusses, ‘Item Girls’, at Granta Online. (2 April)
- Aamer Hussain on Usman T. Malik: The Fabulist of Lahore at Dawn. (4 April)
- Singaporean spec-fic authors Suffian Hakim and Jocelyn Suarez discuss telling dark stories at Singapore Time Out. (5 April)
- Emad El-Din Aysha interviews Malaysian writer Chuah Gaut Eng about her only science fiction story ‘Memoirs of an Aranaean Harpist’ at Eksentrika.com. (22 April)
- Lee Mandelo at Tor.com reviews Terminal Boredom, the first of two collections from the iconic Japanese writer Izumi Suzuki. (22 April)
- Asian SEA Story on Facebook has an overview of 10 ghosts and ghouls from across Southeast Asia. (25 April)
Category: Singapore
Two days at the 2017 Singapore Writers Festival
The 2017 Singapore Writers Festival had a focus on speculative fiction this year, so I caught an early bus from Hua Hin to Bangkok then a Cathay flight to Singapore just to catch the last two days of the Festival, 11th-12th November.
I made it just in time to the Arts House for the last panel of the day for the 11th, Writing Between the Genre Lines, featuring Aliette de Bodard, Jason Erik Lundberg and O Thiam Chin, moderated by Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé. Each writer read an extract or short story, then discussion focussed on a range of subjects with questions from the audience. While it’s always good to hear writers read their own words, I’d have preferred more panel discussion and less time spent on the readings which took up almost half an hour, but it was getting late and the audience seemed to relax nicely into the whole thing and the discussion was good-humoured and lively.
Met up with Jason afterwards while he was signing books, and he introduced me to the genial Victor Fernando R. Ocampo who was hanging around nearby. Victor’s collection The Infinite Library and Other Stories was a book high on my list of those to look out for and as I’d just bought it in the Arts House bookstore, Victor signed it.
On the 12th the main draw for me was Aliette’s talk ‘“Not Everyone Is Oppressed Equally” – Why We Should Look Beyond the Merely Heroic’, it was a packed out venue with extra seating provided in an adjoining room, and Aliette came across loud and clear. The point to her talk was that there are ordinary people struggling through oppression who get overlooked for simply carrying on through impossible circumstances, and that this needs to be recognised in fiction as well as fact.
As I expected I would, because I am hopelessly bound to buying books, I spent a lot of time in the Arts House bookstore which for the event also doubled as a ‘dealer’s room’ for local publishers. Bought eleven books in total, and Aliette also signed for me her recently published The House of Binding Thorns. It was a shame I never got to meet up with Dean Francis Alfar and Nikki Alfar as we had hoped, and I’d have loved to have had a chat with O Thiam Chin to let him know how much I appreciated the subtlety of the supernatural elements in his novel Now That It’s Over – and perhaps selfishly to correct him on the novel’s one geographical mistake.
There were of course plenty of interesting speculative fiction events during the week that I never got a chance to see, but I look forward to doing this again in 2018 when hopefully there will be a similar presence of spec-fic in the programming and I’ll be able to spend more time in Singapore (and therefore more dollars in the Arts House bookstore).
Book haul:
Shelly Bryant, Launch Pad, 2017, Epigram Books
Audrey Chin, Nine Cuts, 2015, Math Paper Press
Aliette de Bodard, The House of Binding Thorns, 2017, Gollancz
Isa Kamari, Intercession, 2002 (2010 Marshall Cavendish edition)
Patricia Karunungan et al., eds., This Is How You Walk on the Moon, 2016, Ethos Books
S. Mickey Lin, Uncanny Valley, 2017, Marshall Cavendish
Nuraliah Norasid, The Gatekeeper, 2017, Epigram Books
Victor Fernando R. Ocampo, The Infinite Library and Other Stories, 2017, Math Paper Press
Cyril Wong, Let Me Tell You Something About That Night, 2009 (2012 Ethos Books edition)
Kevin Martens Wong, Altered Straits, 2017, Epigram Books
Daryl Qilin Yam, Kappa Quartet, 2016, Epigram Books
The Big Sky Library 