Book Buzz

LONDON, Sept 8 — Former premier Tony Blair has postponed a party at the Tate Modern art gallery celebrating the launch of his autobiography because of threats from protesters, his office said today. Anti-war demonstrators had planned to disrupt the reception on Wednesday evening and a group of celebrated artists including Tracey Emin and Vivienne Westwood had called on the gallery to cancel the “disgraceful” event. Blair has also been forced to cancel a signing session for A Journey at a bookstore in central London. “It has been postponed for the same reason as the book signing,” a spokesman for Blair said. “We don’t want to put our guests through the unpleasant consequences of the actions of demonstrators.” At the weekend, protestors hurled eggs and shoes at the former prime minister during a promotional event in Dublin. Blair, prime minister for Labour between 1997 and 2007, led Britain into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In particular, the occupation of Iraq by Western coalition forc...

by BorneoExpatWriter Tropical Affairs didn’t win, so no two years in a row for me, but I did have a nice time. I finally met with Lydia Teh, whom I wrote “ The Merdeka Miracle” with last year. Too bad Tunku Halim couldn’t join us. I also met with authors Kuan Guat Choo and Peggy Tan Pek Tao, a former colleague of mine at USM, and this year’s winner for non-fiction for her book Life The Malaysian Style . So that’s two years in a row for USM! Afterwards I met with Yvonne Lee, who gave me a copy of her latest book, Madness Aboard! for writing a blurb inside, after we met at the BookFest last year. I also caught up with Lee Eeleen, who has been making headway with lots of her short stories lately, reminding me about a big opportunity to publish some of my own short stories in Singapore that I overlooked! I also met with several MPH representatives, including Eric Forbes and Shirley Ng, whom I’m in contact with constantly over marketing and publicity and ordering books. She been extremel...

Pung: I was tired of reading manuals by Asian women on how to feel miserable and oppressed. Young girls—particularly Southeast Asian girls—are socialised not to vocalise any form of anger or annoyance. KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 11 — Alice Pung was born in Australia in 1981, a month after her family fled from the killing fields of Cambodia. Her father named her Alice because he thought their new home was a Wonderland. She is now a writer and a lawyer. Unpolished Gem is her first book; warm-spirited and wonderfully wise, it is a vibrant, irreverent portrait of an ordinary girl growing up straddling two worlds in a big new country. She is also the editor of Growing Up Asian in Australia, an honest and often-funny collection of accounts by both well-known authors and exciting new voices about what it really is like to grow up Asian in Australia. Pung, who was on a three-month international writer residency at The University of Iowa’s International Writing Programme (IWP) in 2009, is working on...