Be happy, whatever you celebrate!

Granted there are parts of Asia where nobody celebrates Christmas, but Asian Books Blog is following a conventional Western pattern, and closing for the holiday-for-some season. We'll be shut from now until January 12, when we'll be back with the announcement of the shortlist for the Asian Books Blog Book of the Lunar Year in the Year of the Rooster.

In the meantime, several recent guest contributors, and also some of our regular contributors, have shared their thoughts on books they'd like either to give as a Christmas gift, or else to receive in their own Christmas stocking. All the books have an Asian theme, of course. Check out their suggestions if you are looking for something to read yourself, or else stuck for an idea about what to give to somebody who seems to have everything.

500 words from Todd Crowell

500 words from is an occasional series in which authors talk about their newly-published books.

Todd Crowell is an American journalist. He has worked for news magazines in Asia for over two decades, with stints in Hong Kong, Thailand and now Japan, where he serves as country correspondent for Asia Sentinel. He has written three earlier books: Explore Macau; Farewell, My Colony: Last Years in the Life of British Hong Kong; and Tokyo: City on the Edge.

There is no single Asian language, of course, but The Dictionary of the Asian Language explains facets of Asian life, culture, arts, politics, and business through exploring words from Asian languages now being absorbed into English. The bite-sized entries are funny as well as informative, they include: discussion of a flower named after former North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il; the Chinese word shengnu, literally leftover, for the new phenomenon of unmarried women over thirty; explication of the differences between jeepney and jilbab, and between yakuza and yellowshirts.

So, over to Todd, to talk about The Dictionary of the Asian Language...

Elaine Chiew converses with multi-talented Bernice Chauly, author of Once We Were There

Photo courtesy of Daniel Adams

Bernice Chauly may be no stranger to readers in Asia but here AsianBooksBlog has the pleasure of talking to her about her first foray into the novel form and the challenges she found in writing her book Once We Were There.

Bernice Chauly is a Malaysian writer, poet, educator and festival director. Born in George Town to Chinese and Punjabi teachers, she read education and English literature in Canada as a government scholar. She is the author of six books of poetry and prose: going there and coming back (1997), The Book of Sins (2008), Lost in KL (2008), Growing Up with Ghosts (2011), which won the Readers’ Choice Awards 2012 in the non-fiction category, and a third collection of poems, Onkalo (2013), described by J.M. Coetzee as ‘direct, honest and powerful’. 

For 20 years she worked as a multidisciplinary artist and is recognised as one of the most significant voices of her generation. Since 2011 she has served the director of the George Town Literary Festival, shortlisted at the International Excellence Awards at the London Book Fair 2017, and is an Honorary Fellow in Writing from the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program (2014). She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. She is also the founder and director of the KL Writers Workshop. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, Once We Were There, was published in 2017 by Epigram Books (Singapore-London) and won the inaugural Penang Monthly Book Prize.