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.
