Elaine Chiew Converses with Indonesian Feminist Gothic Writer Intan Paramaditha

Intan Paramaditha. Courtesy of the Author.

If you haven't yet heard of Indonesian writer Intan Paramaditha, I am convinced you soon will. 

Intan Paramaditha is an Indonesian fiction writer and academic based in Sydney. Her short story collection Apple and Knife, translated into English by Stephen J. Epstein was published by Brow Books (Australia) and Harvill Secker (UK) in 2018. Gentayangan (The Wandering), her debut novel on travel and displacement where readers choose their own narrative path, was selected as Tempo Best Literary Work for Prose Fiction in 2017. The novel received the PEN Translates Award from English PEN and the PEN/ Heim Translation Fund Grant from PEN America, and it will be also be published by Harvill Secker in 2020. She holds a Ph.D. from New York University and teaches Media and Film Studies at Macquarie University.

EC:   Welcome to AsianBooksBlog, Intan. A real pleasure to have you.

IP:     My pleasure! Thank you for having me, Elaine.

EC:   First, congratulations on the publication of your wonderful short story collection, Apple and Knife, full of fable-like and allegoric energy, a celebration of the transgressive and mysterious darkness of womanhood.

I’d like to start with your background. What were your favourite reads in childhood? Did you always know you’d be a writer?

IP:   As a child, I loved reading fairy tales of H.C. Andersen and Grimm. Growing up in a Muslim family, I was also familiar with stories of the prophets and I enjoyed reading them.

The story Apple and Knife which became the title of the collection, was inspired by the story of Yusuf (Joseph) in the Quran. I have always been fascinated with these tales because the moral messages tend to co-exist with violence, often in weird, uncomfortable ways. The “what if” question has always triggered me. What if we told the stories, maintaining all the elements including fantasy, darkness, and violence, but from a different perspective?

I starting writing when I was nine, and I knew that I wanted to be a writer. I sent my stories to a children’s magazine when I was in elementary school. So being a writer is quite predictable. But I did not expect that I would become an academic, which made things more complicated!

Paper Republic 2018 roll call of translations

Paper Republic promotes Chinese literature in English translation. It focusses on new writing from contemporary Chinese writers.

Balanced between the Western new year and the Chinese New Year of the Pig, Paper Republic has just launched its 2018 roll call of published English translations from Chinese. With 33 novels, six poetry collections and three young adult or children’s titles, it’s a unique resource you won’t find anywhere else on the web.

The roll call includes titles from established authors such as:

Girl power for grown-ups: nari shakti 2018 Hindi Word of the Year

The Oxford Dictionaries Hindi Word of the Year is a word or expression that has attracted a great deal of attention and reflects the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the past year.  Oxford Dictionaries has just announced the 2018 Hindi Word of the Year. It is: nari shakti.

Nari shakti expresses the increasing activism of women in various fields.

Derived from Sanskrit, nari means women and shakti means power.  Today the term is used to  mean  women taking charge of their own lives - so girl power, for grown-ups.

Indie Spotlight: Dr. Salman Waqar

Indie spotlight is a regular column focussing on indie authors and self-publishing.

The Surgeon is a work of science fiction recently self-published through Createspace by U.K based, Pakistani-born eye surgeon Dr Salman Waqar. It imagines the shape healthcare might take in the years ahead and explores the profound ethical questions that advances in medicine will provoke worldwide.

The Surgeon is set in London in 2030. By this time, advanced robotic systems are commonly used for surgery. Mortality and complication rates are non-existent, even in operations that were once considered perilous.

But now a prominent politician, and close friend of the UK Prime Minister, dies during routine heart surgery. Why? It seems a killer doctor is on the loose. Join Professor Daniyaal Ashraf, a prominent surgeon originally from Pakistan, as he teams up with the medical authorities, Scotland Yard and even the UK intelligence services, to stop the culprit before more innocent lives are compromised.

Here, Dr Salman Waqar talks about his motivation and inspiration for writing The Surgeon.

Don't forget to vote!

Asian Books Blog is currently running poll to find its book of the lunar year in the Year of the Dog just closing.  Details here. Don't forget to vote!!!!

Broken Wings, Jia Pingwa's novel about a trafficked woman, in translation

             

Nicky Harman writes: I have just finished translating Broken Wings, a novel by Jia Pingwa about human trafficking. Kidnapping is not a popular theme in literary fiction; a Goodreads list consists exclusively of man-rescues-beautiful-girl, “romantic suspense” genre novels. (Though of course, there is also a lot of quality non-fiction, in the form of memoirs by trafficked women.) So some of Jia Pingwa’s biggest fans in China were surprised when this work (called in the original Chinese, 《极花》, literally, extreme- or pole-flower) came out in 2016. Butterfly is a young woman who is kidnapped and taken to a remote country village where Bright Black, the wifeless farmer who has bought her, imprisons her in his cave home. He rapes her and she gives birth to a baby son. The rape, the birth and Butterfly’s fading hopes are described in her own voice, and the effect is bleak. Jia writes in his Afterword that he was inspired to write this story by the experience of a friend whose daughter suffered a similar fate. The real-life young woman was eventually rescued but could not cope either with her sudden notoriety or the loss of her baby, whom she had had to leave behind, and actually returned to the village.

Broken Wings is a disturbing read for other reasons too: Jia Pingwa hints at Butterfly's impending mental breakdown, and presents us with an eventual rescue which may, or may not, be a dream sequence. Will Broken Wings appeal to English-language readers and if so, why? Having been alone with my translation for many months, I was keen to ask my editor, David Lammie, for his views on the book.

Tsundoku #1 – February 2019 - New Year; New Column…

I’ve opted to call this monthly missive on forthcoming books, tsundoku, the Japanese word for all those books that pile up by your bedside just begging you to get on and read them. It seemed fitting for a column that aims squarely at encouraging you to build that pile a little higher each month…


Tsundoku will assemble a random assortment of Asia-related books – novels, non-fiction, photography, graphic art – that comes across my own desk. Being a writer on various matters Asian, as well as a regular reviewer, I often get an early peek at forthcoming books. So tsundoku is essentially me passing on a few recommendations…


So here goes…fiction first….