Novel
Tash Aw ( Map to Invisible World,2009 )
Tash Aw was born in Taipei,Taiwan, to Malaysian parents, he grew up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia before moving to England to study law at Jesus College,Cambridge and at the University of Warwick and then moved to London to write. After graduating he worked at a number of jobs, including as a lawyer for four years whilst writing his debut novel, which he completed during the creative writing course at the University of East Anglia.
His second novel, titled Map of Invisible World, was released in May 2009 to critical acclaim, with TIME Magazine calling it "a complex, gripping drama of private relationships," and describing "Aw's matchless descriptive prose", "immense intelligence and empathy." His 2013 novel Five Star Bilionaire was longlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize.His first novel, The Harmony Silk Factory, was published in 2005. After Malaysian journalists reported that he had been paid over £500,000 for the novel,The Star and The New Straits Times called him the "RM3.5 million man", and local interest in his book deal continues today, even though the novelist himself has consistently denied the size of this advance, preferring to talk about the novel, which was longlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize and won the 2005 Whitbread Book First Novel Award as well as the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel (Asia Pacific region). It also made it to the long-list of the world's prestigious 2007 International Impac Dublin Award and the Guardian First Book Prize. It has thus far been translated into twenty languages. Aw cites his literary influences as Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, Anthony Burgess, William Faulkner and Gustave Flaubert.
Tash Aw's Work
Sometimes, the best
way to capture the scope of vast international movements is to burrow into a
single life.
That's how author Tash
Aw explores the landscape of post-independence Indonesia in the novel Map of the Invisible World.
The book's main
character, a 16-year-old orphan named Adam, is on a quest to find his
stepfather. "He has to face, like his country, questions of where he's
from and where he's going to who his family really is," Aw tells NPR's Guy
Raz.
Adam's country,
Indonesia, is in turmoil. It's the mid-1960s, a decade and a half after the
nation of islands won independence from the Dutch. And the first president,
Sukarno, has created a governing system he dubs "guided democracy."
"By 1964, the
wheels are coming off this rather rickety bandwagon," Aw says, "and
Sukarno's losing his grip on the situation and things are tumbling into
disarray."
Indonesia is about to
suffer through an attempted coup and violent civil war. And in that era, Aw
finds parallels with modern Indonesia. "In the '60s, the great
radicalizing element was Communism," the author says. "Today it's
much more likely to be Islam."
Tash Aw was born in
Taiwan and grew up in Malaysia. He now lives in London. And he admits that what
he calls his "cultural DNA" is reflected in his characters'
rootlessness.
"They're all
living a life that seems to have a big part of it missing," Aw says.
"Some of them can't let go of memories. They can't let go of something
that no longer exists. Their present lives, in a way, seem less important than
their past lives, their invisible lives. And so the novel's really about how
they come to grips with this invisibility ... or not."
EXCERPT FROM THE NOVEL" MAP OF INVISIBLE WORLD" BY TASH AW
Map of the Invisible World: A Novel
By Tash Aw
Hardcover, 336 pages
Spiegel & Grau
List price: $25
Chapter One
When it finally happened, there was no violence, hardly any drama. It
was over very quickly, and then Adam found himself alone once more. Hiding in
the deep shade of the bushes, this is what he saw.
The soldiers jumped from the truck onto the sandy soil. They dusted
themselves off, straightening their hitched-up trouser legs and tucking their
shirts into their waistbands. Their long sleeves were rolled up thickly above
their elbows and made their arms look skinny and frail, and the belts they wore
were so wide they seemed to stretch their waists to their chests. They laughed
and joked and aimed pretend-kicks at one another. Their boots were too big and
when they ran they looked like clowns. They were just kids, Adam thought, just
like me, only with guns.
They hesitated as they approached the steps going up to the veranda,
talking among themselves. They were too far away; he couldn't hear what they
were saying. Then two of them went up to the house and when they emerged they
had Karl with them. He was not handcuffed; he followed them slowly, walking to
the truck with his uneven gait before climbing up and disappearing under the
tarpaulin canopy. From a distance he looked small, just like them, just like a
child too, only with fair hair and pink skin.
Stop. Adam wanted to call out, to scream for Karl to come back. Don't
leave, he wanted to shout. But he remained silent and unmoving, shrouded by the
dense, thorny foliage. He could do this now: He held his breath and counted
slowly from one to ten. A long time ago, he had learned this way of controlling
his fear.
The truck reversed and then drew away sharply, kicking up a cloud of
sand and dust; on its side there was a crude chalk drawing of a penis next to
the words your mother —. Overhead the skies were rich and low and black,
pregnant with moisture. It had been like this for some days; it had not rained
in a long time, but now there was a storm coming. Everyone wanted rain.
In truth it did not surprise Adam that the soldiers had come. All month
there had been signs hinting at some impending disaster, but only he seemed to
see them. For weeks beforehand the seas had been rough, the ground trembling
with just the slightest suggestion of an earthquake. One night Adam was
awakened from his sleep by such a tremor, and when he went to the door and
looked outside the coconut trees were swaying sinuously even though there was
no wind; the ground felt uncertain beneath his feet and for a while he could
not be sure that it wasn't he who was swaying rather than the trees. The ginger
and white cat that spent its days bounding across the grass roof in search of
mice and lizards began to creep slowly along, as if suddenly it had become old
and unsteady, until one morning Adam found it dead on the sand, its neck
twisted awkwardly at an angle, its face looking up toward the sky.
Then there was the incident in town. An old man had cycled from his
village in the hills, looking to buy some rice from the Chinese merchant. He'd
just come back from the Hajj, he said; the pilgrimage is an honor but it isn't
cheap. The crops had not been good all year; the dry season had been too long,
and now there was no food left. He asked for credit, but the merchant refused
point-blank. Last year there was a plague of rats, he said; this year there is
a drought. Next year there will be an earthquake and the year after there will
be floods. There is always something on this shit hole of an island. No one has
any money, everyone in town will tell you the same thing. Prices are high, but
it's no one's fault: If you don't have cash, there's nothing anyone can do for
you. So the old man went to the pawnshop with his wife's ring, a small gemstone
that might have been amber, set in a thin band of silver.
The Chinese
pawnbroker peered at it through an eyeglass for a few seconds before handing it
back. A fake, he said, shrugging, a cheap fake. An argument ensued, a scuffle;
insults of a personal, and no doubt racial, nature were exchanged. Later that
evening, when the hot heavy night had descended, someone — it is not clear who
— splashed kerosene on the doors of the pawnshop and took a match to it. The
traditional wooden houses of this island (of which not many survive) burn
easily, and within half an hour it was engulfed in flames. There were no
survivors. The Chinese shops stayed closed for three days; no one could buy
anything. Suddenly there were fistfights all over town. Communists were
arriving from the mainland to capitalize on the unrest, everyone said. Gangs of
youths roamed the streets armed with machetes and daubing graffiti on houses.
Commies DIE. Foreigners Chinese go to hel.
It was like an article from the newspapers played out for real, the
static images rising from the newsprint and coming to life before Adam's very
eyes. The charred timber remains of burned-out buildings, the bloodred paint on
walls. The empty streets. Adam knew that there were troubles elsewhere in
Indonesia. He had heard there was a revolution of some sort — not like the ones
in France or Russia or China, which he had read about, but something fuzzier
and more indistinct, where no one was quite sure what needed to be overthrown,
or what to be kept. But those were problems that belonged to Java and Sumatra —
at the other end of this country of islands strung out across the sea like
seaweed on the shore. That was what everyone thought. Only Adam knew that they
were not safe.Karl had refused to do anything. He did not once consider leaving."But ... " Adam tried to protest. He read the newspapers and
listened to the radio, and he knew that things were happening all across the
archipelago."Why should we?""Because of your ... because we are, I mean, you are
different." Even as he spoke he knew what the response would be.
"I am as Indonesian as anyone else on this island. My passport says
so. Skin color has nothing to do with it, I've always told you that. And if the
police come for me, I'll tell them the same thing. I have committed no crime;
I'm just like everyone else."And so they had stayed. They had stayed, and the soldiers had come. Adam
had been right all along; he knew the soldiers would come for them. He had
imagined himself being in jail with Karl in Surabaya or somewhere else on the
mainland, maybe even Jakarta, but now he was alone. It was the first time in
his life he had been alone — the first time in this life at least.
He waited in the bushes long after the truck had gone. He didn't know
what he was waiting for but he waited anyway, squatting with his backside
nearly touching the ground, his knees pulled up to his chin. When it was nearly
dark and the sea breeze started up again he walked back to the house and sat on
the veranda. He sat and he waited until it was properly night, until he could
see nothing but the silhouettes of the trees against the deep blankness of the
sea beyond, and he felt calmer.
Night falls quickly in these islands, and once it arrives you can see
nothing. If you light a lamp it will illuminate a small space around you quite
perfectly, but beyond this pool of watery brilliance there is nothing. The
hills, the scrubby forests, rocky shoreline, the beaches of black sand — they
become indistinguishable, they cease to exist as independent forms. And so,
sitting motionless in the dark, only his shallow breaths reveal that Adam is
still there, still waiting.
Excerpted from Map of the Invisible World by Tash Aw Copyright 2010
by Tash Aw. Excerpted by permission of Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random
House Inc. All rights reserved.
Source :
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/
Short Stories
Shivani Sivagurunathan (Wildlife on Coal Island ,2012)
Shivani Sivagurunathan is a Malaysian fiction writer . She born in Kuala Lumpur and raised in Port Dickson, she spent eight years in the United Kingdom where she studied comparative literature. She now lives in Malaysia and lectures at University of Nottingham,Malaysia.She also produces the short stories compilation entitled Wildlife on Coal Island in 2012. Her creative work has been published in numerous international journals including “Anon”, “Flash”, “Cha: An Asian Literary Journal” and “Agenda”. She is currently working on a novel set in Malaysia and Sri Lanka.
Briefly about Shivani's Wildlife on Coal Island
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'Wildlife
on Coal Island' is a collection of eleven stories, all
set on a fictional island located in present day Malaysia. Characters tell
their own stories but occasionally appear in the stories of others. The
collection is in the vein of V.S. Naipaul’s 'Miguel Street' and Sherwood
Anderson’s 'Winesburg, Ohio' where place and character define the trajectory of
the stories. Coal Island is peopled with such characters: An ageing Chinese
opera singer and her pet monkey. A self-proclaimed psychic who sees kingfishers
in the sky and is convinced that a tsunami is coming. A murderer who finds
worldly wisdom in a wandering Malayan tapir. An ex-colonial plantation
overseer, battling with the literal and lateral python of his past. An obese supermarket
matriarch who talks to bats’.
What is Coal Island? Why must be Coal Island?
Coal
Island is a place of secrets, gossip and murder. Peopled with characters that
simultaneously laugh at life and are broken by it, it is a Petri dish for
experiments with the darkness that sometimes enters ordinary days and the
surprising clarity that comes after suffering.
The poem "Coral" was published in Golddust magazine
http://issuu.com/golddust/docs/issue15/49
Shivani Sivagurunathan has been writing since her teens and has been published in a few poetry
publications in the United Kingdom , including Agenda Broadsheet, The Wolf and
light house city. Her poems are
generally written in free verse although she has written sonnets, sestinas and
villanelles.Her poems are best described as being introspective but this is usually manifested through an
engagement with the natural world. Being an artist as well, they tend to be
very visual and she often paints pictures that not only accompany the poems but
flesh them out. This allows for a re-engagement with the poems and a consequent
reworking of them. She draws
inspiration from the works of Ted Hughes, Pablo Neruda, Geoffrey Hill, Derek
Walcott, Alice Oswald, David Malouf, Dylan Thomas and Federico Garcia Lorca.
She is currently working on a long poem on the history, culture, religions and
the natural environment of Malaysia.
PLAYWRIGHT
Rani Moorthy (Handful of Henna,2010)
Rani Moorthy is a Malaysia born playwright, actress, and artistic director of Rasa Productions. Following the race riot of 1969 her family tried to emigrate to Singapore, but were unsuccessful for a time. When they eventually made it, Moorthy began her acting career, appearing in theatre and hosting The Ra Ra Show, a television comedy. In 1996, she emigrated to the United Kingdom. Rani was educated at the 'National University of Singapore.
Handful
of Henna (2010) Synopsis
Being dragged by her mother back
to the family village thousands of miles away is no fun for 13-year-old
Nasreen. In the monsoon rain, not being able to text friends, she little
expects what will be uncovered on her first visit. But with the mystical power
of henna, a secret garden of buried dreams, and more than a little help from
the wagging tongues of Aunties, Grandparents and neighbours, she is about to
discover some unexpected truths about her mother. Based on real stories from
Muslim women, this is an evocative and enchanting story of homecoming,
adventure, fear and joy for a girl and her mother. Skipping back and forth
across time and between lives lived across two cultures; four actresses create
a bustling, colourful world bursting with music, dance and family celebration.
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