Q & A: Balli Kaur Jaswal

Balli Kaur Jaswal is a Singaporean novelist of Punjabi extraction.  As a child, she lived all over the world, thanks to her roaming diplomat father. After studying for an undergraduate creative writing degree in the US she continued work on her first novel, Inheritance, during a year spent in the UK, where she was a recipient of the David TK Wong Fellowship at the University of East Anglia – an award made annually to a novelist whose work deals with some aspect of East Asia. She then moved to Australia to do a postgraduate teaching degree in Melbourne, where she met her partner. She ended up staying in Melbourne for 5 years. In 2014, Inheritance won the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelist Award. She then moved back to Singapore, and in 2015 her second novel Sugarbread was a finalist for the city-state’s richest literary prize, the Epigram Books Fiction Prize.  Her recently-published third novel, Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows, was the subject of a hotly-contested auction won by HarperCollins, in London, for a six-figure GBP sum.

Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows follows members of the Punjabi immigrant community in the UK as they struggle to negotiate between two cultures. It is set in London, in Southhall, an area which is home to a large Punjabi population. Balli says her novel is about “a group of Punjabi widows who sign up for a literacy class, which quickly evolves into a space where they can speak freely about things that their community considers taboo. At first, their discussions are centred on erotic fantasies but as the trust builds, the women become empowered to break their silence about other injustices in the community.”

Liu Xiaobo

Amongst many other retrospects, tributes and obituaries, click here for the response from The New York Review of Books.

LSE Review of Books bookshop guides

The London School of Economics (LSE) is one of the world’s leading insitutions for the study of social sciences, economics, politics, and related subjects.

LSE Review of Books publishes daily reviews of books across the social sciences, all of them written by experts. This encourages wide public discussion of some of today’s most pressing global issues, including climate change, the struggle against religious fundamentalism, the challenges currently faced by Western-style democracies, the rise of China, how the internet is changing society, and issues connected with maintaining, or promoting, free speech.

The LSE Review of Books also runs an online guide to the world’s best bookshops, which has included contributions on Mumbai, and Fukuoka - and you don’t have to have a connection to the LSE to contribute.

Freedom to publish and the IPA Prix Voltaire by Trasvin Jittidecharak

The International Publishers Association (IPA) makes an annual award to publishers, the IPA Prix Voltaire. This rewards exemplary courage in upholding the freedom to publish and in enabling others to exercise their right to freedom of expression.

The IPA Freedom to Publish Committee is responsible for picking the shortlist. It announced the shortlist for the 2017 prize  in June.

Thai publisher Trasvin Jittidecharak is a member of the IPA Freedom to Publish Committee

Issues connected with freedom of speech, and freedom to publish, are of particular importance across much of Asia, since ours in a region where these freedom are often denied, or actively resisted. Trasvin Jittidecharak here offers an Asian perspective on the Prix Voltaire.

Extract: City of Protest: a recent history of dissent in Hong Kong by Antony Dapiran

As part of Penguin’s new Hong Kong series – for which see the previous post - Antony Dapiran has just brought out City of Protest: a recent history of dissent in Hong Kong, which explores the role of protest in Hong Kong life, up to and including the Umbrella Movement.

Antony has written and presented extensively on China and Hong Kong business, politics and culture. A contributing editor of Art Asia Pacific magazine, his writing has also appeared in publications including the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian Financial Review, Nikkei Asia Review and Hong Kong Free Press. In a legal career of almost twenty years, Antony advised China’s leading companies raising capital and doing business internationally.

He here provides a short extract from the preface to City of Protest.

The Hong Kong Series: new books celebrating the many faces of HK

Twenty years ago, Hong Kong’s sovereignty was handed from Britain, to China. Since then, Hong Kong has accumulated new stories worth telling: stories looking slantwise at history; stories containing lessons for people everywhere. The multicultural hub, bustling with possibility and promise, has become a centre for creativity and a source of inspiration for those on the mainland, throughout the Chinese diaspora, and beyond. But what conclusions can be drawn from a city that faces daily contradictions, such as bank towers looming over shanty towns, mango trees growing on industrial roundabouts, and art that seems driven by commercial requirements? Then there are the political strains of negotiating Hong Kong people’s desire for Western-style democracy, with Beijing’s insistence the Chinese way is best.

These and other issues are explored in a new Hong Kong Series from Penguin. Authors of launch titles are Dung Kai-cheung, Antony Dapiran, Xu Xi, Christopher DeWolf, Ben Bland, Simon Cartledge, and  Magnus Renfrew. They use both fiction and non-fiction to examine Hong Kong’s past, and future, its people, politics and art, its architecture and economy. All except Xu Xi are based full-time in Hong Kong. Collectively, the launch titles shine a light on the whole of Hong Kong’s society, and on the city’s changes over the past twenty years.

New book announcement: Monsoon Summer by Julia Gregson

Oxfordshire, 1947. Exhausted by the war and nursing a tragic secret, Kit Smallwood flees to Wickam Farm to recuperate. There she throws herself into helping set up a charity sending midwives to India - and she also meets Tomas, a handsome, complicated, and charming Indian trainee doctor nearing the end of his English education, she falls utterly in love.

Tomas makes her laugh and marriage should be the easiest thing in the world.  But when he informs his family that he is shortly to return home with an English bride, his parents are appalled.

Despite being Anglo-Indian herself, Kit's own mother is equally horrified. She has spent most of her life trying to erase a painful past and the problems of her mixed-race heritage - losing her daughter to an Indian man is her worst fear realised.