Lauren J. Sharkey is a writer, teacher, and transracial adoptee. After her birth in South Korea, she was adopted by Irish Catholic parents and raised on Long Island. Sharkey holds an MFA in Creative Writing & Literature, and her creative nonfiction has appeared in the Asian American Feminist Collective’s digital storytelling project, First Times, as well as several anthologies including I Am Strength! and Women under Scrutiny.
Inconvenient Daughter, Lauren's debut novel, explores the questions surrounding transracial adoption, the ties that bind, and what it means to belong.
Sunday 17 May 2020
Novelist and Award-Winning Poet Reshma Ruia Chats With Elaine Chiew about her poetry collection A Dinner Party In The Home Counties
Reshma Ruia is an award winning writer and poet based in Manchester. She was born in India and brought up in Rome and did her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at the London School of Economics. She worked as an economist with the United Nations in Rome and with the OECD in Paris. Following her move to Manchester, she did a further Masters Degree and a PhD in Creative Writing and Critical Thought at Manchester University. She is a fiction editor at the Jaggery Literary Magazine and book reviewer at Words of Colour. She is also the co-founder of The Whole Kahani, a writers’ collective. Her first novel, ‘Something Black in the Lentil Soup’, was described in the Sunday Times as ‘a gem of straight-faced comedy.’ Her second novel manuscript, ‘A Mouthful of Silence’ was shortlisted for the SI Leeds literary award. Her writing has appeared in The Mechanics’ Institute Review, The Nottingham Review, Asia Literary Review, Confluence, Funny Pearls, Fictive Dream, The Good Journal, and various anthologies. They have also been commissioned and broadcast on BBC Radio. Her debut collection of poetry, ‘A Dinner Party in the Home Counties,’ winner is of the 2019 Word Masala Award is out now.
Synopsis:
‘A Dinner Party in the Home Counties’ explores the themes of belonging and identity against a backdrop of social mores and conventions. The poems explore the diasporic experience of leading a translated life, yearning to belong to a past that one no longer owns and a future that is murky and unclear. There is a sense of melancholic nostalgia in these poems but also a fierce kind of determination to embark on a new beginning and make the best of one’s circumstances. The poems are particularly relevant to our times when there is a growing sense of parochialism and hostility towards ‘the outsider.’ They will resonate with all those who have portable roots and are at home everywhere and nowhere.
The poems also portray the emotive minefield of relationships, questioning the ambiguity behind maternal or filial love. Society conditions us to love our parent or child or partner but the poems challenge this by describing the tug of war between a woman’s sense of self and the roles she is expected to play.
There is an undercurrent of mortality running through some of the poems. A sense of an ending and a reflection on what the passage of time can do to one’s dreams and aspirations.
Monday 11 May 2020
Talented Writer & Translator Tiffany Tsao Chats With Elaine Chiew About The Majesties
Book cover design by James Iacobelli and artwork by Joseph Lee |
Bio:
Tiffany Tsao is a writer and literary translator. She is the author of The Majesties, as well as the Oddfits fantasy series (to date: The Oddfits and The More Known World). Her translations of Indonesian authors include Sergius Seeks Bacchus by Norman Erikson Pasaribu, Paper Boats by Dee Lestari, and The Birdwoman’s Palate by Laksmi Pamuntjak.
Synopsis:
Gwendolyn and Estella have always been as close as sisters can be. Growing up in a wealthy, eminent, and sometimes deceitful family, they’ve relied on each other for support and confidence. But now Gwendolyn is lying in a coma, the sole survivor of Estella’s poisoning of their whole clan.
As Gwendolyn struggles to regain consciousness, she desperately retraces her memories, trying to uncover the moment that led to this shocking and brutal act. Was it their aunt’s mysterious death at sea? Estella’s unhappy marriage to a dangerously brutish man? Or were the shifting loyalties and unspoken resentments at the heart of their opulent world too much to bear? Can Gwendolyn, at last, confront the carefully buried mysteries in their family’s past and the truth about who she and her sister really are?
Traveling from the luxurious world of the rich and powerful in Indonesia to the most spectacular shows at Paris Fashion Week, from the sunny coasts of California to the melting pot of Melbourne’s university scene, The Majesties is a haunting and deeply evocative novel about the dark secrets that can build a family empire—and also bring it crashing down.
Tuesday 5 May 2020
Tsundoku #9 - May 2020
It's out second Tsundoku of lockdown and maybe we have a problem - fewer books than normal are being published but maybe, if you're lucky, you're getting through your tsundoku pile? So this May is a little light, but some good stuff all the same...
Monday 4 May 2020
First Three Way Translation Interview: Elaine Chiew Chats With Kulleh Grasi and Pauline Fan about Tell Me, Kenyalang
Courtesy of Circumference Books |
Synopsis:
TELL ME, KENYALANG is a collection of poems by Kulleh Grasi, a writer and musician from Sarawak, a Malaysian state on the island of Borneo. This groundbreaking book is one of a handful of contemporary works of poetry written in Malay to be translated into English and the first in decades to include Malaysian indigenous languages. Translator Pauline Fan brings the work into a thrilling, living English. Kulleh Grasi's poems are entirely new and yet intimate. They are entwined with myth and nature and yet are fully post-modern. They are outside the context of American poetry and also deeply inside the questions and experiences American poets are grappling with today: questions of identity in relation to nation and language and sexuality.
Grasi, both a known poet and rock star in Malaysia, writes new rivers and islands into the landscape of identity. Grasi says: "I was reading all kinds of Malay literature. None of it spoke from the experience of Borneo's indigenous people, so I started keeping journals, writing about the lives of indigenous communities that I observed with my own eyes. This was the true beginning of my poetry."
TELL ME, KENYALANG will change the way people think of contemporary poetry throughout the world and about the role of indigenous languages in global literature and in translation. The book is a powerhouse.
Sunday 3 May 2020
Japan's Greatest Victory, Britain's Worst Defeat - A Memoir of the Battle of Singapore
It’s often said “history is written by the victors,” and this
only half true. While the narrative of World War II is definitely constructed from
the Allied lens, this does not mean that the vanquished were unable to tell their
stories. German officers and soldiers pumped out volumes of memoirs during the
postwar years, many of which were consumed voraciously by readers in America and
Britain. Japanese memoirs were more sparse, at least regarding translations
that made it to the West. One notable exception was Masanobu Tsuji’s memoir Japan’s
Greatest Victory, Britain’s Worst Defeat.
Wednesday 29 April 2020
Translating literary works from the Malay world, Nazry Bahrawi in conversation with Nicky Harman
Dr Nazry Bahrawi, Singapore University of Technology & Design |
What aroused your
interest in translation, and what was the first piece you ever translated?
My journey to
literary translation began as an academic interest. As a doctoral student
reading comparative literature at the University of Warwick, I was supervised
by Susan Bassnett, a household name in translation theory. So, while my thesis
wasn’t directly about translation, I began to explore this field of study first
through conversations with her. Today, I continue to research into translation
to unveil its multifaceted role at shaping what scholars call ‘world
literature’. As an indication of just how complicated translation can get, I’ve
published a comparative analysis of the Bahasa Melayu and Bahasa Indonesia
versions of Syed Hussein Alatas’ seminal book The Myth of the Lazy Native and
found that the former sharpens the ethnic divide between Malays and Chinese in
line with the Malaysian ruling party’s (UMNO) ideology of ketuanan Melayu
(Malay supremacy). This affirms the proposal that translation is mired in
practices of patronage and power as the translation theorist André Lefevere had
pointed out in his book Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary
Fame. This was one of my earliest academic essays. It’d convinced me to dive
deeper into translation research.
After my studies
in 2013, I returned to Singapore. This was when my first foray into literary
translation as practice began. Then, literary translation was starting to gain
traction in my multilingual city-island, though there'd been attempts in the
past. I was invited to deliver a public lecture about translation, and I was
excited to share what I’ve learnt with others. After the lecture, I was
approached by the playwright Nadiputra, a Cultural Medallion winner in
Singapore, to translate a musical that he was writing from Bahasa to English. I
said yes, and the result was a bilingual publication titled Muzika Lorong Buang
Kok (Lorong Buang Kok: The Musical), a play about the last kampong (village) in
urban Singapore. I’ve found the process to be nothing short of cathartic.
Embodying first-hand some of the challenges I’ve read about made the practice
of translation even more complex than I've imagined, and this made it alluring
– an enigma that’s inviting me to explore its depths. Today, I’ve translated
short stories and poems, surtitles for a theatrical adaptation of Anthony
Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, subtitles for a 1960 black-and-white Malay movie
as well as judged a translation contest. Most recently, I partook in a
performance-lecture about my process as a literary translator.
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