Tuesday 28 October 2014

Introducing Raelee Chapman

Raelee Chapman is Asian Books Blog’s new correspondent for e-books, self-publishing, book groups and writing groups. She is to take over our monthly Indie Spotlight, which covers all aspects of self-publishing, and she will also write occasional posts on the other areas under her remit. Here she introduces herself.

“I am an Australian freelance writer living in Singapore, and a member of the Singapore Writers Group. My fiction, non-fiction and book reviews have been published in Australia and overseas, most recently in Singapore-American Newspaper and Singapore Review of Books.

I formed the Singapore Ladies Asian Literary Book Group through meetup.com earlier this year. It started as a ladies night out - if enough bookworms of the opposite sex join we can definitely change the name! The group was not initially focused on books with Asian interest. But, to my surprise, though wide and varied, the book choices members put forward each month inevitably had Asian authors, or were set in Asia. As a group, we realised we all just clicked with this theme and decided that these are the kind of books we want to continue exploring. We started with Tash Aw’s Five Star Billionaire, and then progressed to Singaporean author Ovidia Yu’s Aunty Lee’s Delights - Ovidia was kind enough to attend our meeting. Since then we have progressed to read a WWII drama set in Singapore, a comedy regarding a love-match marriage in India, a Khaled Hosseini novel and now we are reading Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan. New members are welcome to sign up and join through the meetup site:  http://www.meetup.com/Singaporeladiesasianliterarybookgroup/

My first Indie Spotlight, later this week, will find me in conversation with Tim Brennan, author of Lucky Rice, winner of an eLit Award for e-books (multi-media production).”


If you would like to see your work highlighted in Indie Spotlight, or if you are a member of a writing group or a book group you would like to see featured on Asian Books Blog, then please get in touch with Raelee at asianbooksblog@gmail.com