Lion City Lit: Tom Benner

Asian Books Blog is based in Singapore. Lion City Lit explores what’s going on in the City-State, lit-wise. Here journalist Tom Benner explains why it’s a wonderful source of stories…

Authors in the UK

Authors in the UK are currently up-in-arms about the fact that, very often, everybody at a literary festival but them gets paid: the caterers; the cleaners; the organisers...For comment from the UK-based Society of Authors see here.

Booksellers disappear in Hong Kong

As even the least likely probable reader of this blog must surely be aware there have been some worrying disappearances of booksellers in Hong Kong recently. For a statement of concern from the European and International Booksellers Federation see here.

This week in Asian Review of Books

See the Asian Review of Books for ever-interesting discussion. Here are links to its newest reviews, excerpts, letters, essays, listings, translations, news items, and round ups:

Anuradha Roy wins DSC Prize for Sleeping on Jupiter 
Tobacco in China: an excerpt from A Token of Elegance: Cigarette Holders in Vogue 
Right Concept, Wrong Country: Tianming and Tianxia in International Relations by Salvatore Babones
Steep Tea, poetry by Jee Leong Koh reviewed by Jennifer Wong
Hong Kong-born poet Sarah Howe wins TS Eliot prize 
ARB Quarterly for January 2016

The Sunday Post

A rojak* of items that caught my eye this week…

Just quickly...

You may be interested in one or other of these pieces, which I've had published this week:

Review of Little Aunt Crane by Geling Yan / Yan Geling for Asian Review of Books

Interview with Elisabeth Koch, a milliner in Beijing, for the UK Telegraph

My weekly blog about life in Singapore for the UK Telegraph

500 words from Ann Bennett

500 words from...is a series of guest posts from authors writing about Asia, and published by Asia-based, or Asia-focussed, publishing houses, in which they talk about their latest books. Here Ann Bennett writes about Bamboo Island, the second book in her World War II South East Asian trilogy.  Last year, in the Year of the Horse, the first book, Bamboo Heart, won the inaugural Asian Books Blog Book of the Lunar New Year. The trilogy is published by Monsoon, a company specialising in books that open windows onto South East Asian history.

So: over to Ann…