Vampire Hunter D by Hideyuki Kikuchi - a Gothic Horror Sci-fi Fantasy

 

In the distant future, humanity clusters in small villages, reduced to a medieval style of living, while monsters, demons, and vampires roam the outskirts of civilization. It’s a hard life, full of danger, witchcraft, and death – this is the world of Vampire Hunter D.

My chance to talk for an hour about Chinese literature -- with an excellent interviewer

I had slightly mixed feelings when Georgia de Chamberet and I began our podcast for Bookblast. On the one hand, it was a great opportunity to talk both about the literary translation website I work on, Paper Republic, and the range of novels that feature on our 2018 roll call of Chinese translations into English. On the other hand, Georgia’s questions required some serious thought and I felt I was in danger of making wild generalizations (perhaps inevitable when you’re talking about a country and a literature as big as China). What follows is an excerpt from our Q+A. I hope you’ll find it thought-provoking enough to listen to the full podcast.

SWF WRITER FOCUS: Elaine Chiew interviews Singapore-based Filipino writer Victor Fernando Ocampo

For every writer, once in a rare while, a book comes along and really shakes you up, where (instead of that height/ceiling metaphor) I’d like to say instead, the floor drops on which you thought the legs of fiction stood.   Victor Fernando Ocampo’s The Infinite Library and Other Stories did that for me.  The ideas that power this collection are not just incredibly imaginative, they also weave a hybrid crossing through magical realism, allegory and science fiction, that ‘synchronicity’ Ocampo mentions in one of his stories.  Rendered in prose that bears a unique voice, and also dark subtle humour in surprising turns of phrases, this collection is an invitation to a labyrinth for thought.

First an introduction to Victor:

Victor Fernando R. Ocampo is a Singapore-based Filipino writer. He is the author of The Infinite Library and Other Stories (Math Paper Press, 2017) and Here be Dragons (Canvas Press, 2015), which won the Romeo Forbes Children’s Story Award in 2012.  

Singapore Writers Festival Day 3. Aram and World Conflicts/Sci-Fi and the Fate of Humanity by Elaine Chiew

Aram in the Age of Cultural and Cross-Border Conflicts, courtesy Elaine Chiew

The panel entitled Aram in the Age of Cultural and Cross-Border Conflicts, moderated by TV presenter Greta Georges, opened to a room so packed, it was standing three-deep in the back.  But the panel appeared to have gotten mired in the thicket of translation of the meaning of 'Aram'.  Using the English translation of Aram as 'the good life', the panelists Héctor Abad, Koh Buck Song, and Suki Kim, whose credentials range from human rights memoirist (Abad), literary editor, non-fiction writer of 30 books and poet (Koh) to undercover investigative journalism (Kim) tackled it from three countries’ perspectives – Colombia, Singapore and North Korea, respectively.