Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Literature
A 1911 scandal, involving the wife of a headmaster at a KL school who was convicted in a
murder trial after shooting dead a male friend, was the basis for Somerset Maugham's short
story and play
The Letter
. Anthony Burgess picked up the thread of the dying days of Brit-
ish colonial rule in the region in
The Malayan Trilogy
, written in the 1950s when he was a
school teacher in the country: it was Burgess who coined the phrase 'cooler lumpur'.
The
Malayan Life of Ferdach O Haney
is a fictionalised account of the author Frederick Lees'
experiences in 1950s Malaya; Lees was uniquely placed to observe mid-20th-century life in
KL in his role as a top-ranking civil servant.
The literary baton has long since been passed to locally born writers such as Tash Aw
(
www.tash-aw.com
), whose debut novel,
The Harmony Silk Factory,
won the 2005 Whit-
bread First Novel Award; the Man Booker Prize-nominated author Tan Twan Eng
(
www.tantwaneng.com
), whose literature fuses a fascination with Malaysia's past and the
impact of Japanese culture; and Preeta Samarasan (
http://preetasamarasan.com
)
, whose
novel
Evening is the Whole Day
shines a light on the experiences of an Indian immigrant
family in the early 1980s.
Samarasan is one of the writers whose work features in
Urban Odysseys,
edited by Janet
Tay and Eric Forbes, a mixed bag of short stories set in KL. Another excellent collection of
locally penned short stories about different aspects of sexuality is
Body 2 Body,
edited by
Jerome Kugan and Pang Khee Teik. This anthology has a story by Brian Gomez, whose
comedy-thriller
Devil's Place
is fun to read and very evocative of its KL setting. Kam
Raslan's
Confessions of an Old Boy
is another comic tale, this time following the adven-
tures both at home and abroad of politico Dato' Hamid.
Leading promoters of the KL lit scene are Sharon Bakar (
ht-
tp://thebookaholic.blogspot.co.uk
)
and Bernice Chauly (
http://bernicechauly.com
)
. They
host two monthly literary events around town: Readings@Seksan and Ceritaku@No Black
Tie. Pieces read out at the Readings events have been published in two volumes of
Read-
ings from Readings
.
A snappy read is Amir Muhammad's
Rojak: Bite-Sized Stories,
in which the multitalented artist and writer
gathers a selection of the 350-word vignettes, many of them comic, that he penned as part of the British
Council- sponsored creative writing project City of Shared Stories (
ht-
