Yang-May Ooi

With Yang-May Ooi, author of the novels The Flame Tree, Mindgame (both first published by Houghton Mifflin UK) and the forthcoming Tianming Traviata, at yesterday's Brekkie for Litbloggers at MPH.

Yang-May's talk on her experiences in publishing was easy to get into, and I thought she was very composed and prepared, without losing an air of friendliness and casualness. Also greatly enjoyed her reading at Seksan's later in the afternoon, where she read from two versions of the same passage from her novel-in-progress, one in standard and one in Malaysian English (I preferred the latter).

I was shocked and amused that Eric Forbes, an editor with MPH's publishing division, liked my "controversial" Hips Don't Lie article enough to include it in the list of places where my literary writing has appeared in his introduction to my own reading (sad to say, I am a much more prolific journalist than lit writer -- having written articles for perhaps a dozen different publications in the last five years)!

Yang-May, very impressively, phone-blogs(!) about the event here (episode 6). I am just thrilled to hear what she has about my work! :)

Xeus writes about the event here, Kenny Mah of wonderful prose (download his e-book Broken Mornings, I highly recommend it!) and great posters here, Dina Zaman here, Sharon Bakar's much-anticipated one (How To Tell If You're A Successful Blogger Tip #1: People call and sms you if you don't post for a day, asking if you're alive) here and Seafolding here.