What is Britain’s favourite second novel? The Royal Society of Literature is eager to find out.
The Garden of Evening Mists, by our very own Tan Twan Eng, features in this new competition that has been created to raise literacy awareness and discussion.
The winner for the Nation’s Favourite Second Novel will be announced on Wednesday 5th April so please do get your vote in before then if you haven’t already.
To read more about this post, and to cast your vote, please follow the link here.
We Talk Women interview our very own, Gavin Weston.
Gavin Weston is the author of Harmattan – set in Niger, West Africa – which chronicles the early years of Haoua, a child bride growing up in the fictional village of Wadata. Weston was a volunteer with the American NGO Africare in the eighties and, since 2011, has been an ambassador for FORWARD, a London-based NGO campaigning to end child marriage and FGM. He is a practising visual artist, a lecturer and a former Writer-in-Residence at one of Northern Ireland’s top security prisons.
For the full Q&A interview, please click here.
The Straits Times had the enormous pleasure of interviewing our very own author, Tan Twan Eng.
Finding the human in the monster, published September 18th by Lee Jian Xuan, The Straits Times.
Whether he is writing at his desk or teaching in class, the award- winning Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng is always in a neatly pressed suit, with a matching tie to boot.
Of his attire, the 44-year-old tells The Sunday Times: “I’m more comfortable in this. To me, being a writer is a job and you treat it with respect.
“To get into the mindset of writing, I have to dress the part.”
Tan, who was born in Penang and worked as an intellectual property lawyer before becoming a novelist, says his professional background gave him a leg-up in the literary world.
He says: “The years I worked at a law firm taught me how to deal with clients professionally, reply to e-mail on time and gave me discipline. One reason that my agent signed me is because of how professional my submission letter and CV looked.”
He wrote part of his first novel Gift Of Rain while studying for a master’s in shipping law (“It was just a bull**** reason to take two years off work”) in Cape Town, South Africa. He now splits his time mainly between South Africa and Malaysia.
To read the full article please click here.
A special one-off interview with Tan Twan Eng is now live on the BBC website.
‘This month we’re in The Book Lounge Bookshop in Cape Town, South Africa and talking to the Malaysian novelist Tan Twan Eng about his Man Asian Literary Prize-winning novel, The Garden of Evening Mists.
This haunting tale, set in the jungles of Malaya during and after World War II, centres on Yun Ling, the sole survivor of a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in which her sister perished.
Driven by the desire to honour her sister’s memory through the creation of a lush and sensuous garden Yun Ling falls into a relationship with the enigmatic Japanese gardener Aritomo and begins a journey into her past, inextricably linked with the secrets of her troubled country’s history.’
(Picture: Tan Twan Eng. Credit: Lloyd Smith.)
Please Click Here for the full 50 minute interview.
The beautiful novel by Clio Gray was recently longlisted for the prestigious Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. The wonderful blog, Chronic Bibliophilia, wrote a lovely review of The Anatomist’s Dream describing Clio’s superb use of both language and style, and her skill at creating the most intriguing and colourful characters:
‘Again and again, Gray’s characters unwittingly breach boundaries, but these breaches are a calculated and deliberate trope through which Gray manipulates her story and her audience with masterful ease.’
‘Philbert, along with the reader, is urged to consider the impact of small lives and small actions. I expect Clio Gray’s action, and the lives she has created in “The Anatomist’s Dream”, to cause ripples in the literary world for years to come.’
To read the full review please click here, or to purchase your copy please click here.