Huzir Sulaiman & Atomic Jaya

   Huzir Sulaiman (born in 1973) is a Malaysian actor, director and writer. One of Malaysia's leading dramatists, acclaimed for his vibrant, inventive use of language and incisive insight into human behavior in general and the Asian psyche in particular. His plays, often charged with dark humour, political satire, and surrealistic twists, have won numerous awards and international recognition. He currently lives in Singapore.

    His father is Haji Sulaiman Abdullah, who was born G. Srinivasan Iyer, a Tamil Brahmin who later converted to Islam. Sulaiman is a veteran lawyer who served as Malaysian Bar Council president. His mother is Hajjah Mehrun Siraj, who has served as a professor, lawyer, consultant for United Nations agencies, NGO activists and a Commissioner with the Human Rights Commission of Malaysia. For a short time in the early part of this decade, he hosted an afternoon talk show on WOW FM, a now-defunct Malaysian radio station.

    He is currently married to Claire Wong, a Malaysia-born Singaporean stage actress.He is best known for his works "Atomic Jaya", "The Smell of Language", "Hip-Hopera" the Musical, "Notes on Life and Love and Painting", "Election Day", "Those Four Sisters Fernandez", "Occupation" and "Whatever That Is" which have been published in his collection of "Eight Plays" by Silverfish Books. He also contributes articles to the Star.

ATOMIC JAYA

     Written and directed by Huzir Sulaiman, this play is a political satire and a broad-based comedy about Mary Yuen (played by both Karen Tan and Claire Wong), a scientist recruited by the government of Malaysia to build the country’s first atomic bomb. With both actresses taking on multiple roles portraying a myriad of comical and satirical characters that come into her life, Mary Yuen begins to face self-doubt and conflict as she questions the building of such a bomb.

    Sulaiman is known to have a very observant and analytical take on his subjects and Atomic Jaya is no different. However, this time around, he also injects humour – both broad and political – eliciting laughs at the slapstick moments as well as the witty dialogue.

    Sulaiman also directs both the actresses effectively, at times incorporating a kind of mirror effect where both actresses are literally speaking the same dialogue, and at times having the actresses take over each other’s role mid-scene. It is through these clever techniques that two actresses are able to present to us a full-fledged play with a variety of quirky characters.

    The actresses themselves, Wong and Tan, both display great skill in portraying no fewer than a dozen characters between them. Sporting a multitude of accents, mannerisms, body language, gestures and speech patterns, both actresses bring to life each and every person they play on stage.

    It isn’t every day that a local play, about local people and local issues, comes along that is as funny or more so than the best-heralded comedy from the West. All right, the play is really about our neighbours, whom we in Singapore used to share a nation with. So there’s a cultural similarity there – and better yet, a reason for Singaporeans to see a very funny, insightful play that’s ultimately about themselves.

Llyod Fernando

Life Of Llyod Fernando

Lloyd Fernando was born to a Sinhalese family in Sri Lanka in 1926. In 1938, his family migrated to Singapore. Mr. Fernando was educated at St Patrick’s in Singapore, with the Japanese occupation interrupting that education from 1943 to 1945. During the Japanese attack on Singapore, Mr. Fernando’s father was killed. During the Japanese occupation, Fernando worked in a variety of manual labor jobs.

Lloyd Fernando thereafter graduated from the University of Malaya in Singapore, and subsequently served as an instructor at the Singapore Polytechnic. Lloyd Fernando became an assistant lecturer at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur in 1960. Mr. Fernando was awarded a scholarship at Leeds University, UK where he received his PhD.

In 1967 Fernando was appointed to serve as a professor at the English Department of the University of Malaya, where he served until his retirement in 1978. Subsequently, Mr. Fernando studied law at City University in the United Kingdom and then at Middle Temple, returning to Malaysia with two law degrees, whereupon he was employed by a law firm, and thereafter started a separate law practice business. In 1997, Mr. Fernando had a stroke and ceased his professional activities

Literary work

·         Scorpion orchid, 1976

·         Cultures in Conflict, 1986

·         Green is the color, 1993

·         Twenty-two Malaysian Stories: an anthology of writing of writing in English  (editor)

·         “New Women" in the Late Victorian Novel, 1977

Scorpion Orchid

It is a novel by Llyod Fernando, first published by Heinemann Educational Books(Asia) in 1976. The novel is set in Singapore in the 1950s.

Summary of Scorpion Orchid

•Set in 1950’s Singapore – a time of racial tension and nationalistic uprising
•Theme of national birth and the anxieties present regarding racial conflict and ethnic self interest

SYNOPSIS

An exciting first novel set in pre-independence Singapore. Scorpion Orchid follows the lives of four young men—a Malay, an Eurasian, a Chinese and a Tamil—against a backdrop of racial violence and political factions struggling for dominance. Excerpts from classical Malay and colonial English sources appear throughout the narrative, illuminating the roots and significance of this period in history.

THE TEXT AS METAPHOR

•Text is a metaphor for growth of a new nation •The four young men gain a new awareness of their ethnic identities as the negotiate the race riots that destroy their complacent sense of camaraderie •The new awareness is central to their transition from adolescence to adult life •Represents the Malayan society and the transition between former tolerance and present assertiveness

•Scorpion Orchid generally preserves an allegorical distance between the personal and the political. • The personal and the political develop along parallel lines and mirror one another, and when they do intersect they remain clearly defined

CHARACTERS

•Santi, a Tamil Indian, Sabran, a Malay, Guan Kheng, a Chinese, and Peter, a Eurasian.
•Santinathan – Indian, refuses to observe conventions of university life, gets expelled – ends up as village schoolteacher
•Sabran – Malay, involved in politics, gets arrested and his future prospects somewhat set back considerably •Sabran reflects on his family in the kampung (village) that has sacrificed for his education and which exerts a strong emotional pull on him, but is in no position to offer him either comfort or advice.
•Guan Kheng – Chinese, comes from wealthy family, feels betrayed by the Malays who suddenly consider him a foreigner. Peter D’Almeida – Eurasian, confused about his identity, loses faith in ‘new’ Singapore, emigrates to England after he is beaten up in a riot (comes back at the end)
•Sally – uncertain ethnic background and origin, works at a hawker stall, part time prostitute, has an ambiguous relationship with all four men involving sex, money and love, although they pay her for sex she is treated as a friend.

SUMMARY OF GREEN IS THE COLOR

    Lloyd Fernando's Green is the Color is a very interesting novel. The country is still scarred by violence, vigilante groups roam the countryside, religious extremists set up camp in the hinterland, there are still sporadic outbreaks of fighting in the city, and everyone, all the time, is conscious of being watched. It comes as some surprise to find that the story is actually a contemporary reworking of a an episode from the Misa Melayu, an 18th century classic written by Raja Chulan. In this climate of unease, Fernando employs a multi-racial cast of characters.

     At the centre of the novel there's a core of four main characters, good (if idealistic)young people who cross the racial divide to become friends, and even fall in love. There's Dahlan, a young lawyer and activist who invites trouble by making impassioned speech on the subject of religious intolerance on the steps of a Malacca church; his friend from university days, Yun Ming, a civil servant working for the Ministry of Unity who seeks justice by working from within the government. The most fully realized character of the novel is Siti Sara, and much of the story is told from her viewpoint. A sociologist and academic, she's newly returned from studies in America where she found life much more straightforward, and trapped in a loveless marriage to Omar, a young man much influenced by the Iranian revolution who seeks purification by joining religious commune.

    The hungry passion between Yun Ming and Siti - almost bordering on violence at times and breaking both social and religious taboos - is very well depicted. Like the others, Sara is struggling to make sense of events :Nobody could get may sixty-nine right, she thought. It was hopeless to pretend you could be objective about it. speaking even to someone close to you, you were careful for fear the person might unwittingly quote you to others. if a third person was present, it was worse, you spoke for the other person's benefit. If hews Malay you spoke one way, Chinese another, Indian another. even if he wasn’t listening. in the end the spun tissue, like an unsightly scab, became your vision of what happened; the wound beneath continued to run pus. Although the novel is narrated from a third person viewpoint, it is curious that just one chapter is narrated by Sara's father, one of the minor characters, an elderly village imam and a man of great compassion and insight.

Tash Aw

    Born in Taipei, Taiwan, to Malaysian parents, he grew up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia before moving to England to study law at Jesus College, Cambridge and at the University of Warwick and then moved to London to write. After graduating he worked at a number of jobs, including as a lawyer for four years whilst writing his debut novel, which he completed during the creative writing course at the University of East Anglia.

     His first novel, The Harmony Silk Factory, was published in 2005. After Malaysian journalists reported that he had been paid over £500,000 for the novel, The Star and The New Straits Times called him the "RM3.5 million man", and local interest in his book deal continues today, even though the novelist himself has consistently denied the size of this advance, preferring to talk about the novel, which was long-listed for the 2005 Man Booker Prize and won the 2005 Whitbread Book Awards First Novel Award as well as the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel (Asia Pacific region).

     It also made it to the long-list of the world's prestigious 2007 International Impac Dublin Award and the Guardian First Book Prize. It has thus far been translated into twenty languages. Aw cites his literary influences as Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, Anthony Burgess, William Faulkner and Gustave Flaubert. His second novel, titled Map of the Invisible World, was released in May 2009 to critical acclaim, with TIME Magazine calling it "a complex, gripping drama of private relationships," and describing "Aw's matchless descriptive prose", "immense intelligence and empathy." His 2013 novel Five Star Billionaire was long-listed for the 2013 Man Booker Prize.

Tan Twan Eng

 Tan Twan Eng is a Malaysian author of fiction born in Penang in 1972. He studied Law at the University Of London and later worked as an advocate and solicitor in one of Kuala Lumpur ‘s law firms before becoming a full-time writer. He has a first-dan ranking in Aikido and live in Cape Town.

  His first novel, The Gift Of Rain , published in 2007, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. It is set in Penang before and during the Japanese occupation of Malaya in World War 2. The Gift Of Rain has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Greek, Romanian, Czech, Serbian and French.

His second novel, The Garden of Evening Mist, was published in 2012. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012 and won the Man Asian Literary Prize. And the Walker Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

Tan has spoken at literary festivals, including the Singapore Writers Festival,  the Ubud Writer’s Festival in Bali, the Asia Man Booker Festival in Hong Kong, the Shanghai International Literary Festival, The Perth Writer Festival, the Abbotsford Convent in Melbourne, Australia, and the Franschhoek Literary Festival in South Africa.

Sybil Kathigasu

     Sybil Kathigasu was born Sybil Medan Daly to an Irish-Eurasian planter (Joseph Daly) and a French-Eurasian midwife (Beatrice Matilda Daly née Martin) on 3 September 1899 in Medan, Sumatra, Indonesia. Her middle name reflects her birthplace, Medan. Her paternal grandparents were an Irishman and a Eurasian woman while her maternal grandparents were a Frenchman (Pierre Louie Martin) and a Eurasian woman (Evelyn Adeline Martin née Morrett). She was the fifth child and the only girl. She was trained as a nurse and midwife and spoke Cantonese fluently. She and her husband, Dr. Abdon Clement Kathigasu, operated a clinic at No 141 Brewster Road (now Jalan Sultan Idris Shah) in Ipoh from 1926 until the Japanese invasion of Malaya. The family escaped to the nearby town of Papan days before Japanese forces occupied Ipoh.

      The local Chinese community fondly remembered Dr. AC Kathigasu and gave him a Hakka nickname "You Loy-De".Sybil Kathigasu's husband was Dr. Arumugam Kanapathi Pillay, a Ceylonese (now Sri Lankan) Tamil from Taiping. He was born on 17 June 1892 in Taiping to Kanapathi Pillay and Thangam. He married Sybil in St John's church (now cathedral) in Bukit Nanas, Kuala Lumpur. Initially there had been a religious objection from her parents as he was a Hindu and she was a Catholic. However with agreement from his father, the wedding took place. They were married on 7 January 1919 in St John’s Church, Bukit Nanas, Kuala Lumpur.

      Sybil's first child was a son born on 26 August 1919, but due to major problems at birth, died after only 19 hours. He was named Michael after Sybil's elder brother who was born in Taiping on 12 November 1892 and was killed in Gallipoli on 10 July 1915 as a member of the British Army. The devastating blow of baby Michael's death led to Sybil's mother suggesting that a young boy, William Pillay, born 25 October 1918, who she had delivered and had remained staying with them at their Pudu house, should be adopted by Sybil and her husband. Then a daughter, Olga, was born to Sybil in Pekeliling, Kuala Lumpur, on 26 February 1921. The earlier sudden death of baby Michael made Olga a very special baby to Sybil, when she was born without problems.So when Sybil returned to Ipoh on 7 April 1921, it was not only with Olga, but also with William and her mother who had agreed to stay in Ipoh with the family.

Their children are:

1. William Pillay (25 October 1918)-adopted

2. Michael Kathigasu (26 August 1919)-died after only 19 hours of being born

3. Olga Kathigasu (26 February 1921)

4. Dawn Kathigasu (21 September 1936)

Sybil Kathigasu died on 4 June 1948 aged 48 in Britain and her body was buried in Lanark, Scotland. 

Shirley Lim

Shirley Lim was born in Melaka, Malaysia into a life of poverty, deprivation, parental violence, and abandonment in a culture that, at that time, rarely recognized girls as individuals, Lim had a pretty unhappy childhood.

Lim had her early education at Infant Jesus Convent under the British Colonial education system. She won a federal scholarship to the University Of Malaya, where she earned B.A first class honours degree in English. In 1969, at the age of twenty-four, she entered graduate school at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts under Fullbright scholarship, and received a P.H.D in English and American Literature in 1973.

Lim is married to Charles Bazerman who are also a professor and chair of the Education Department at University of California, Santa Barbara. Lim is a professor in English Department at the University Of California, Santa Barbara and has also taught internationally at the National University of Singapore, the National institute Education of Nanyang Technology University, and was the chair Professor at the University of Hong Kong where she also taught poetry and creative writing. she has authored several books of poems, short stories, and criticism, and serves as editor and co-editor of numerous scholarly works.

Books of poetry and short stories

"Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems" (1980)
"Another Country" (1982)
"Life's Mysteries" (1985)
"No Man's Grove and Other Poems" (1985)
"Modern Secret: New and Selected Poems" (1989)
"Monsoon History" (1994)
"Two Dreams: New and Selected Stories" (1997)
"What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say" (1998)

Malaysian Writer

New Malaysian writers for each of the  5 genre:

1)novel-Tan Twan Eng  "The Garden of Evening"
Tan Twan Eng is a Malaysian author of Fiction born in Penang 1972. Tan studied law at the University of London, and later worked as an advocate and solocitor in one of K.L's law firms before becoming a full-time writer.

2)short story-Shirley Geok Lim "Journey"
 Shirley Geok-lin Lim was born in Malacca Malaysia. She is an American writer of poetry,fiction, and criticism. She was married to Charles Bazerman and studied in University Of Malaya, Brandeis University.

3)poem- Nadira Ilana “Bare Hand”

Recently, She was a Film Director at Freelance
before that, she was the assistant producer at Apparat and Curatorial Volunteer at Queensland Art Gallery.

4)Drama-Noordin Hassan  “Mask” 
 Nordin was born on 18 Jan 1929 at Jalan Hatin, Pulau pinang. he started his studies at Sekolah Melayu Perak Road, Pulau Pinang and later extended the studies at Penang Free School.

5)Other(autobiography)- Mahathir Mohamad “A Doctor in the House: The Memoirs of Tun Dr     Mahathir Mohamad”

Mahathir Bin Mohamad is a malaysian politician who was the forth prime Minister of Malaysia. He held the post for 22 years from 1981 to 2003, making him Malaysian's longest serving Prime Minister. His political career spanned almost 40 years. He was born on July 10, 1925( age 88 ), at Alor Setar. He was married to Siti Hasmah Mohamad Ali and blessed with 7 children.