Women in Translation: 5 books to read from North/East Asia

This month, August, is a chance to celebrate women in translation, specifically women authors who’s works have been translated. There’s so much good translated literature out there. For this month, I’ll be sharing some inspiration for women authors from around the world who have had their work translated into English.

I know a lot of people read works translated from English into their own language, and there’s so many languages that works need to be translated into. But since I only read in English, I’m going to be highlighting works that have been translated into English.

This week we’ll be visiting North/East Asia. Depending on the source, it may call the region either North or East Asia. This area typically includes countries like China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Mongolia.

Countries like Japan and South Korea are very prominent in translated literature because their governments actively support translation efforts. Their governments have prioritized translating their national literature as a way of cultural preservation and enabling their local talent to gain international recognition. I think this is amazing, and I would love to see more countries supporting their local talent in this way.

Due to this additional support, you’ll often see a lot of books recommended from these countries, especially when talking about books in translation. I’ve included a few books from Japan and South Korea, but I’ve also included a few others to diversify the list.

Five books from North/East Asia

Here’s a list of five books of translated literature with women authors from North/East Asia.

Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang (China)
Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin (Taiwan)
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa (Japan)
Human Acts by Han Kang (Korea)
Earthlings by Sayaka Murata (Japan)

Keep reading to find out more about each one. I’ve listed them in order of when they were published in their original language.

Love in a Fallen City (1946) – China

by Eileen Chang
Translated by Karen S. Kingsbury

Year Published: 1946
(English version in 2006)
Storygraph Categories:
fiction, classics, short stories, emotional, mysterious, reflective, slow-paced

Eileen Chang is one of the great writers of twentieth-century China, where she enjoys a passionate following both on the mainland and in Taiwan. At the heart of Chang’s achievement is her short fiction—tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life. Written when Chang was still in her twenties, these extraordinary stories combine an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature. Love in a Fallen City, the first collection in English of this dazzling body of work, introduces American readers to the stark and glamorous vision of a modern master.

Notes of a Crocodile (1994) – Taiwan

by Qiu Miaojin
Translated by Bonnie Huie

Year Published: 1994
(English version in 2017)
Storygraph Categories:
fiction, classics, lgbtqia+, literary, dark, emotional, reflective, medium-paced
Qiu Miaojin was posthumously awarded the China Times Literature Award in 1995 for this book

Set in the post-martial-law era of late 1980s Taipei, Notes of a Crocodile depicts the coming-of-age of a group of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan’s most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, Qiu Miaojin’s cult classic novel is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and countercultural icon.

The Housekeeper and the Professor (2003) – Japan

by Yōko Ogawa
Translated by Stephen Snyder

Year Published: 2003
(English version in 2009)
Storygraph Categories:
fiction, contemporary, literary, emotional, reflective, medium-paced
It received the Hon’ya Taisho award and a film adaptation was released in January 2006

He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem–ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory.

She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him.

And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor’s mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities–like the Housekeeper’s shoe size–and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.

The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family.

Human Acts (2014) – South Korea

by Han Kang
Translated by Deborah Smith

Year Published: 2014
(English version in 2016)
Storygraph Categories:
fiction, historical, literary, dark, emotional, sad, medium-paced
It won Korea’s Manhae Prize for Literature and Italy’s Malaparte Prize

Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. In the wake of a viciously suppressed student uprising, a boy searches for his friend’s corpse, a consciousness searches for its abandoned body, and a brutalised country searches for a voice. In a sequence of interconnected chapters the victims and the bereaved encounter censorship, denial, forgiveness and the echoing agony of the original trauma.

Human Acts is a universal book, utterly modern and profoundly timeless. Already a controversial bestseller and award-winning book in Korea, it confirms Han Kang as a writer of immense importance.

Earthlings (2018) – Japan

by Sayaka Murata
Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

Year Published: 2018
(English version in 2020)
Storygraph Categories:
fiction, horror, literary, magical realism, challenging, dark, medium-paced
Note, this novel deals with many difficult themes, I would recommend checking content warnings before reading if there are any subjects you want to avoid.

Natsuki isn’t like the other girls. She has a wand and a transformation mirror. She might be a witch, or an alien from another planet. Together with her cousin Yuu, Natsuki spends her summers in the wild mountains of Nagano, dreaming of other worlds. When a terrible sequence of events threatens to part the two children forever, they make a promise: survive, no matter what.

Now Natsuki is grown. She lives a quiet life with her asexual husband, surviving as best she can by pretending to be normal. But the demands of Natsuki’s family are increasing, her friends wonder why she’s still not pregnant, and dark shadows from Natsuki’s childhood are pursuing her. Fleeing the suburbs for the mountains of her childhood, Natsuki prepares herself with a reunion with Yuu. Will he still remember their promise? And will he help her keep it?

Final thoughts

I hope you found something of interest in this list of books written by North/East Asian authors.

I’m always looking for more suggestions of books to read. If you have a favourite book written by a North/East Asian author, please feel free to share it in a comment below!

Have you read any of these books? What did you think of the book?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below.

June 28, 2023June 28, 2023

The perfect protective membrane

Excerpt from The Membranes by Chi Ta-Wei

This is an excerpt from the book The Membranes by Chi Ta-Wei, translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich.

The ocean made a perfect protective membrane, a thick, robust barrier that could shield humans, animals, and plants from ultraviolet radiation.

Plus, the ocean was the primordial birthplace of all earth’s plants and animals. Back when there was no life on land, it was the ocean that generated the earliest vegetation, and the ocean that eventually produced our most primitive ancestors, These earliest plants and animals evolved in water because sunlight was lethal; the ozone layer had not yet formed. Only when the collective gases exhaled by the denizens of the ocean had reached a critical mass and erupted through the surface and into the atmosphere was the radiation-filtering protective layer formed. And only under the shelter of this newly formed barrier could the first brave organisms crawl to the shore and withstand the assault of sunlight on their vulnerable bodies.

who could have imagined that eons later, in the twenty-first century, they would return to their old ocean home?

But humans, unlike fish or shrimp, were not designed to swim, so it would be necessary to build subaquatic cities. Fortunately, the ocean was abundant with natural resources, and with the right adjustments the sea floor could be adapted for human habitation. Not only that, but the technology for harnessing solar power was improving by the day and could now be used to convert great quantities of energy collected aboveground for use on the ocean floor. Since the sun had forced humanity back into the ocean, it was only fair that humanity took some of its power in return.

But the middle of the twenty-first century there was little habitable land left, and humankind finally invaded the oceans en masse, a process euphemistically referred to as “migration.” During the process of “reclaiming wasteland,” new reserves of crude oil were discovered one after another. This accelerated the rate of underwater construction, which in turn provided a solution to the problem of high unemployment, a surprise benefit of migration to the ocean floor! With great “humanity,” they told themselves, humankind “rescued” all manner of favored flora and fauna by bringing them them along to the bottom of the sea. This time, of course they made sure not to bring cockroaches and mosquitoes, but they also left behind many critical organisms, Waves of human settlers inevitably led to the ecological devastation of the ocean floor, but people felt they’d done their best to act humanely. Don’t blame us, they thought, we did the best we could.

By 2060, the majority of humanity had migrated to the ocean, with only one percent left to eke out a living on the surface. Pretty much all the main infrastructure of human civilization had migrated to the ocean floor, including industrial agriculture and animal husbandry. All that remained aboveground were those historical sites too large to be moved—the pyramids, for example, or the February 28th Incident Memorial Plaques ubiquitous on the island of Taiwan—tough archeologist and tourists still visited the surface. The new sea dwellers also left behind unwanted structures like pollution producing factories and nuclear power plants (which meant, however, that some key personnel were forced to remain on the surface to man the reactors). Also abandoned were prisons and various tools of punishment, since governments universally recognized that leaving convicts on the surface was actually a convenient punishment in and of itself. (Let them burn—who needed the electric chair!)

The earth’s surface, which had once struggled to bear the burden of overpopulation, was now almost completely deserted. Though even now humankind proved reluctant to surrender the legacy of its battles for power, still everything—everything—on the surface of the earth went the way of the Great Wall off China To think that these ambitious marvels of engineering built on the backs of the common people, wound up the playthings of the tourism industry! Their majesty was reduced to an absurd footnotes.

But new man-made landscapes were also propagated on the surface, These new landscapes would have been inconceivable to the people who came before: more extravagant than works by the twentieth-century environmental artist Christo, but also more practical. For example, there were the metastasizing “fields” of solar panel arrays stretching as far as the eye could see, used to harvest solar power for the population under the ocean.

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

The Membranes – Summary

Here is the book summary:

It is the late twenty-first century, and Momo is the most celebrated dermal care technician in all of T City. Humanity has migrated to domes at the bottom of the sea to escape devastating climate change. The world is dominated by powerful media conglomerates and runs on exploited cyborg labor. Momo prefers to keep to herself, and anyway she’s too busy for other relationships: her clients include some of the city’s best-known media personalities. But after meeting her estranged mother, she begins to explore her true identity, a journey that leads to questioning the bounds of gender, memory, self, and reality.

First published in Taiwan in 1995, The Membranes is a classic of queer speculative fiction in Chinese. Chi Ta-wei weaves dystopian tropes–heirloom animals, radiation-proof combat drones, sinister surveillance technologies–into a sensitive portrait of one young woman’s quest for self-understanding. Predicting everything from fitness tracking to social media saturation, this visionary and sublime novel stands out for its queer and trans themes. The Membranes reveals the diversity and originality of contemporary speculative fiction in Chinese, exploring gender and sexuality, technological domination, and regimes of capital, all while applying an unflinching self-reflexivity to the reader’s own role. Ari Larissa Heinrich’s translation brings Chi’s hybrid punk sensibility to all readers interested in books that test the limits of where speculative fiction can go.

Translated by: Ari Larissa Heinrich

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

June 10, 2023June 10, 2023

Classics to read for Pride Month

It’s Pride Month! In honour of celebrating Pride Month, I’ll be sharing some LGBTQIA2S+ book recommendations. Keep checking in each week for more recommendations.

Are you tired of reading classics by boring old white men? Here’s your chance to read some queer friendly classics!

Even though most classics represent heteronormative relationships, there have always been people who exist outside those norms. There’s a small portion of classics that represent people within the LGBTQIA2S+ community and I think it’s important to highlight them.

Everyone deserves to see themselves in the books they read.

It’s unfortunate that there aren’t more classics with a range of sexualities portrayed, but sadly, it’s not surprising. Especially since homosexuality has been illegal, and remains illegal in many countries around the world (source).

However, it does make me think about the many works of art that have been lost to history due to society’s limited acceptance of people.

With all the barriers authors faced to get these types of novels published, I think it makes the ones that do exist that much more valuable.

Five classic LGBTQIA2S+ books

Here’s a list of five classic books that represent some aspect of the LGBTQIA2S+ community.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1890)
Orlando by Virginia Woolf (1928)
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (1956)
Maurice by E.M. Forster (1971)
The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1982)

Keep reading to find out more about each one. I’ve listed them in order of when they were published.

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

by Oscar Wilde

Year Published: 1890
Storygraph Categories: fiction, classics, horror, lgbtqia+, literary, dark, mysterious, reflective, medium-paced
Oscar Wilde’s only novel

Summary:

In this celebrated work Wilde forged a devastating portrait of the effects of evil and debauchery on a young aesthete in late-19th-century England. Combining elements of the Gothic horror novel and decadent French fiction, the book centers on a striking premise: As Dorian Gray sinks into a life of crime and gross sensuality, his body retains perfect youth and vigor while his recently painted portrait grows day by day into a hideous record of evil, which he must keep hidden from the world. For over a century, this mesmerizing tale of horror and suspense has enjoyed wide popularity. It ranks as one of Wilde’s most important creations and among the classic achievements of its kind.

Orlando (1928)

by Virginia Woolf

Year Published: 1928
Storygraph Categories: fiction, classics, lgbtqia+, literary, magical realism, challenging, reflective, slow-paced
Considered a feminist classic

Summary:

As his tale begins, Orlando is a passionate young nobleman whose days are spent in rowdy revelry, filled with the colourful delights of Queen Elizabeth’s court. By the close, he will have transformed into a modern, 36-year-old woman and three centuries will have passed. Orlando will not only witness the making of history from its edge, but will find that his unique position as a woman who knows what it is to be a man will give him insight into matters of the heart.

Giovanni’s Room (1956)

by James Baldwin

Year Published: 1956
Storygraph Categories:
fiction, classics, lgbtqia+, literary, emotional, reflective, sad, medium-paced
Considered a classic of gay literature, and helped foster discussions of homosexuality and bisexuality in mainstream readers

Summary:

Baldwin’s haunting and controversial second novel is his most sustained treatment of sexuality, and a classic of gay literature. In a 1950s Paris swarming with expatriates and characterized by dangerous liaisons and hidden violence, an American finds himself unable to repress his impulses, despite his determination to live the conventional life he envisions for himself. After meeting and proposing to a young woman, he falls into a lengthy affair with an Italian bartender and is confounded and tortured by his sexual identity as he oscillates between the two.

Examining the mystery of love and passion in an intensely imagined narrative, Baldwin creates a moving and complex story of death and desire that is revelatory in its insight.

Maurice (1971)

by E.M. Forster

Year Published: 1971 (written in 1914)
Storygraph Categories:
fiction, classics, lgbtqia+, literary, emotional, reflective, medium-paced
Forster wrote the book in 1914 but wouldn’t let it be published until after his death.

Summary:

Maurice is heartbroken over unrequited love, which opened his heart and mind to his own sexual identity. In order to be true to himself, he goes against the grain of society’s often unspoken rules of class, wealth, and politics.

Forster understood that his homage to same-sex love, if published when he completed it in 1914, would probably end his career. Thus, Maurice languished in a drawer for fifty-seven years, the author requesting it be published only after his death (along with his stories about homosexuality later collected in The Life to Come).

Since its release in 1971, Maurice has been widely read and praised. It has been, and continues to be, adapted for major stage productions, including the 1987 Oscar-nominated film adaptation starring Hugh Grant and James Wilby.

The Color Purple (1982)

by Alice Walker

Year Published: 1982
Storygraph Categories:
fiction, classics, historical, lgbtqia+, literary, emotional, reflective, slow-paced
Importance: Winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize (making Walker the first black woman to win the prize)

Summary:

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Alice Walker’s iconic modern classic is now a Penguin Book.

A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, first from Celie to God, then the sisters to each other despite the unknown, the novel draws readers into its rich and memorable portrayals of Celie, Nettie, Shug Avery and Sofia and their experience.

The Color Purple broke the silence around domestic and sexual abuse, narrating the lives of women through their pain and struggle, companionship and growth, resilience and bravery. Deeply compassionate and beautifully imagined, Alice Walker’s epic carries readers on a spirit-affirming journey towards redemption and love.

Final thoughts

I’ve only listed five books here, so it’s only a small portion of the classics available. But hopefully something caught your eye.

I’m always looking for more suggestions of books to read. If you have a favourite classic that represents part of the LGBTQIA2S+ community, please feel free to share it in a comment below!

Have you read any of these books? What did you think of the book?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below.

June 2, 2023June 2, 2023

Around the world in books: Five books by Vietnamese authors

The month of May is often an opportunity to celebrate Asian and Pacific Islander people and their heritage. In America the month is called Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month and in Canada it’s called Asian Heritage Month. For this month, I’ll be sharing books by Asian authors.

I know it’s currently June, but since I missed a week, here’s one more book list with Asian authors for Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.

Have you ever wanted to visit Vietnam? Here’s your chance to visit Vietnam through reading!

Vietnam’s history

Vietnam has such a long history. Throughout their past, many external forces have exerted influence over the Vietnamese. Two of the most recent influences were the French and the Americans.

The French slowly exerted more and more influence over Vietnam over 3.5 centuries, and between 1859-1884, French eroded Vietnam’s sovereignty and forced them to become a French colony. French rule lasted until 1954, with a break during WWII from 1941-1945 when the Japanese took over. In 1954, French Indochina was dissolved into Cambodia, Laos and North and South Vietnam according to the Geneva Accords.

Shortly after the French withdrew, North Vietnam was led by the Viet Minh and the USA started providing military and financial support for South Vietnam. The Vietnam War (or as it’s called in Vietnam the “Resistance war against the United States” (Kháng chiến chống Mỹ) and sometimes called the “American War”) lasted almost 20 years. This war is often seen as a Cold War-era proxy war, as the North was supported by communist parties and the south was supported by the USA and other anti-communist forces.

The Vietnam War has had a huge impact on the Vietnamese people and in turn their literature. There were enormous human casualties, from the 1-3 million Vietnamese that were killed, to the millions of refugees that left the region and the additional 250,000 refugees that died on their way to safety.

Historical impact seen today

All this history has had a huge impact on Vietnam, the Vietnamese people, their culture and even literature. You see it in the banh mi on baguettes that they got from the French and the way that Vietnamese authors are producing literature in different languages and while living outside of Vietnam.

I’ve included a range of books in this list, and notably the books have been written in Vietnamese, French and English. Hopefully this list gives you a glimpse into the range of Vietnamese voices in modern literature and sparks your interest to read more from Vietnamese authors.

Five books from Vietnamese authors

Here’s a list of five books with Vietnamese authors.

Dumb Luck by Vũ Trọng Phụng (1936)
The Crystal Messenger by Phạm Thị Hoài (1988)
Mãn by Kim Thúy (2013)
The Frangipani Hotel by Violet Kupersmith (2014)
The Mountains Sing by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai (2020)

I’ve listed them in order of when they were published. Keep reading to find out more about each one and at the end there’s a bonus suggestion!

Dumb Luck (1936)

by Vũ Trọng Phụng, translated by Nguyễn Nguyệt Cầm and Peter Zinoman

Year Published: 1936, English version in 2002
Storygraph Categories:
fiction, classics, dark, funny, medium-paced
Language: Vietnamese
Banned by the Vietnamese Communist Party, first in North Vietnam from 1960 to 1975, then throughout the unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam until 1986

Summary:

Banned in Vietnam until 1986, Dumb Luck-by the controversial and influential Vietnamese writer Vu Trong Phung–is a bitter satire of the rage for modernization in Vietnam during the late colonial era. First published in Hanoi during 1936, it follows the absurd and unexpected rise within colonial society of a street-smart vagabond named Red-haired Xuan. As it charts Xuan’s fantastic social ascent, the novel provides a panoramic view of late colonial urban social order, from the filthy sidewalks of Hanoi’s old commercial quarter to the gaudy mansions of the emergent Francophile northern upper classes. The transformation of traditional Vietnamese class and gender relations triggered by the growth of colonial capitalism represents a major theme of the novel.

Dumb Luck is the first translation of a major work by Vu Trong Phung, arguably the greatest Vietnamese writer of the twentieth century. The novel’s clever plot, richly drawn characters and humorous tone and its preoccupation with sex, fashion and capitalism will appeal to a wide audience. It will appeal to students and scholars of Vietnam, comparative literature, colonial and postcolonial studies, and Southeast Asian civilization.

The Crystal Messenger (1988)

by Phạm Thị Hoài, translated by Ton-That Quynh-Du

Year Published: 1988, English version in 1997
Storygraph Categories:
fiction, emotional, reflective, slow-paced
Language: Vietnamese
Described as the ‘renaissance of Vietnamese literature’ and was banned by the Vietnamese government

Summary:

This award winning book has been described as the ‘renaissance of Vietnamese literature’. Written by a young woman in her twenties at the end of an era when Vietnam closed itself off from the world, it is widely regarded as one of the most important works of fiction ever to come out of that country. Ostensibly, The Crystal Messenger is a magical and moving story of two sisters’ journeys to emotional and sexual maturity. But it is also a powerful allegory about the fate of North and South Vietnam, the struggle with reunification after the war, and the effect of consumerism and westernisation on the nation’s soul.

Mãn (2013)

by Kim Thúy, translated from French by Sheila Fischman

Year Published: 2013, English version in 2014
Storygraph Categories:
fiction, literary, emotional, reflective, slow-paced
Language: French
Kim Thuy is a Vietnamese-born Canadian writer, whose debut novel Ru won the Governor General’s Award for French-language fiction at the 2010 Governor General’s Awards

Summary:

Mãn has three mothers: the one who gives birth to her in wartime, the nun who plucks her from a vegetable garden, and her beloved Maman, who becomes a spy to survive. Seeking security for her grown daughter, Maman finds Mãn a husband – a lonely Vietnamese restaurateur who lives in Montreal.

Thrown into a new world, Mãn discovers her natural talent as a chef. Gracefully she practices her art, with food as her medium. She creates dishes that are much more than sustenance for the body: they evoke memory and emotion, time and place, and even bring her customers to tears.

Mãn is a mystery – her name means ‘perfect fulfillment’, yet she and her husband seem to drift along, respectfully and dutifully. But when she encounters a married chef in Paris, everything changes in the instant of a fleeting touch, and Mãn discovers the all-encompassing obsession and ever-present dangers of a love affair.

Full of indelible images of beauty, delicacy and quiet power, Mãn is a novel that begs to be savoured for its language, its sensuousness and its love of life.

The Frangipani Hotel (2014)

by Violet Kupersmith

Year Published: 2014
Storygraph Categories: fiction, fantasy, horror, short stories, reflective, medium-paced
Language: English
Based on traditional Vietnamese folk tales

Violet Kupersmith was born in America, but her mother is from Da Nang Vietnam and fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon.

Summary:

A beautiful young woman appears fully dressed in an overflowing bathtub at the Frangipani Hotel in Hanoi. A jaded teenage girl in Houston befriends an older Vietnamese gentleman she discovers naked behind a dumpster. A trucker in Saigon is asked to drive a dying young man home to his village. A plump Vietnamese-American teenager is sent to her elderly grandmother in Ho Chi Minh City to lose weight, only to be lured out of the house by the wafting aroma of freshly baked bread. In these evocative and always surprising stories, the supernatural coexists with the mundane lives of characters who struggle against the burdens of the past.

Based on traditional Vietnamese folk tales told to Kupersmith by her grandmother, these fantastical, chilling, and thoroughly contemporary stories are a boldly original exploration of Vietnamese culture, addressing both the immigrant experience and the lives of those who remained behind. Lurking in the background of them all is a larger ghost—that of the Vietnam War, whose legacy continues to haunt us.

The Mountains Sing (2020)

by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

Year Published: 2020
Storygraph Categories:
fiction, historical, emotional, reflective, sad, medium-paced
Language: English
Her debut novel and first work in English (known as a poet in Vietnam)

Summary:

With the epic sweep of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko or Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing and the lyrical beauty of Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan, The Mountains Sing tells an enveloping, multigenerational tale of the Trần family, set against the backdrop of the Việt Nam War. Trần Diệu Lan, who was born in 1920, was forced to flee her family farm with her six children during the Land Reform as the Communist government rose in the North. Years later in Hà Nội, her young granddaughter, Hương, comes of age as her parents and uncles head off down the Hồ Chí Minh Trail to fight in a conflict that tore apart not just her beloved country, but also her family.

Vivid, gripping, and steeped in the language and traditions of Việt Nam, The Mountains Sing brings to life the human costs of this conflict from the point of view of the Vietnamese people themselves, while showing us the true power of kindness and hope.

Bonus Suggestion: Modern Vietnamese poet Bao Phi

Bao Phi is a Vietnamese-American spoken word poet and community activist. He was born in Vietnam and raised in Minnesota. His second book of poetry, Thousand Star Hotel, was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award, named by NPR as one of the Best Books of 2017, and was named the best poetry book of 2017 by San Francisco State’s Poetry Center.

Thousand Star Hotel (2017)

by Bao Phi

Year Published: 2017
Storygraph Categories:
nonfiction, poetry, race, emotional, reflective, slow-paced
Importance: Bao Phi is a National Poetry Slam finalist.

Summary:

Thousand Star Hotel confronts the silence around racism, police brutality, and the invisibility of the Asian American urban poor.

Final thoughts

I hope you found something of interest in this list of books written by Vietnamese authors.

I’m always looking for more suggestions of books to read. If you have a favourite book written by a Vietnamese author, please feel free to share it in a comment below!

Have you read any of these books? What did you think of the book?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below.

May 26, 2023May 26, 2023

Around the world in books: Five books from Indonesian authors

Have you ever wanted to visit Indonesia? Here’s your chance to visit Indonesia through reading!

Indonesia is incredibly diverse. The nation includes over 17,000 islands and is the world largest archipelagic state. It’s also the 14th largest country in the world (by area), fourth largest by population, and the world’s third largest democracy.

The people and languages are reflect this diversity and are made up of 1,340 recognized ethnic groups in Indonesia. The national language of Indonesia is Bahasa Indonesia, however most Indonesians also speak one of the 700 local languages.

Despite this diversity, Indonesian literature is rarely included in recommended translated literature lists, and most publishers don’t express an interest in Indonesian literature.

Personally, it seems like we are all missing out on an incredible literary opportunity with a huge country being so underrepresented. There are so many unique perspectives and literary talent that the English reading world is unaware of and unable to experience.

To help remedy this missed opportunity, here are a handful of books written by Indonesian authors. Hopefully you find new book that you want to read from this list.

Five books from Indonesian authors

Here’s a list of five books with authors from Indonesia and translated from Bahasa Indonesia.

Saman by Ayu Utami (1998)
Kill the Radio by Dorothea Rosa Herliany (2001)
Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan (2002)
Man Tiger by Eka Kurniawan (2004)
Apple & Knife by Intan Paramaditha (2018)

Keep reading to find out more about each one. I’ve listed in order of when they were first published.

Saman (1998)

by Ayu Utami, translated by Pamela Allen

Year Published: 1998, English version released in 2005
Storygraph Categories:
fiction, emotional, reflective, slow-paced
This book sparked a new literary movement in Indonesia known as sastra wangi (originally used pejoratively, literally means “fragrant literature”), creating room for an influx of sexually-themed literary works by young Indonesian women.

Summary:

Saman is a story filtered through the lives of its feisty female protagonists and the enigmatic “hero” Saman. It is at once an exposé of the oppression of plantation workers in South Sumatra, a lyrical quest to understand the place of religion and spirituality in contemporary lives, a playful exploration of female sexuality and a story about love in all its guises, while touching on all of Indonesia’s taboos: extramarital sex, political repression and the relationship between Christians and Muslims.

Saman has taken the Indonesian literary world by storm and sold over 100,000 copies in the Indonesian language, and is now available for the first time in English.

Kill the Radio (2001)

by Dorothea Rosa Herliany, translated by Harry Aveling

Year Published: 2001

Summary:

Dorothea Rosa Herliany is one of the most important contemporary poets writing in Indonesia. This volume presents a selection of her recent verse in the original Bahasa Indonesian and in English translation.

Herliany is typical of the second generation of Indonesian writers which emerged after the mid-1980s during the New Order of President Suharto. This newer generation knew little of the colonial Dutch civilization and were a generation removed from the revolutionary ardour of the foundation of the nation: to be ‘Indonesian’ was their natural right. They were born and educated in the regions outside of Jakarta and have chosen to remain there. They were educated in the Indonesian language (usually to tertiary level) and the literature on which they were raised was also written in Indonesian.

Kill the Radio contains a range of poems, many of them personal, with a decidedly feminist edge to them, Others grow form Herliany’s experience of, and concern for, an Indonesia undergoing rapid social and political change during the last five years of the 1990s.

Herliany’s writing reveals a struggle to understand human experience in all its reality not as an ideal but as a fact that displays profound suffering and hurt, without, apparently, any hope of redemption…

Beauty is a Wound (2002)

by Eka Kurniawan, translated by Annie Tucker

Year Published: 2002, English version in 2015
Storygraph Categories:
fiction, historical, magical realism, dark, emotional, mysterious, slow-paced
Long listed for the International Booker Prize, and won the Best Translated Book Award in 2016

Summary:

The epic novel Beauty Is a Wound combines history, satire, family tragedy, legend, humor, and romance in a sweeping polyphony. The beautiful Indo prostitute Dewi Ayu and her four daughters are beset by incest, murder, bestiality, rape, insanity, monstrosity, and the often vengeful undead. Kurniawan’s gleefully grotesque hyperbole functions as a scathing critique of his young nation’s troubled past: the rapacious offhand greed of colonialism; the chaotic struggle for independence; the 1965 mass murders of perhaps a million “Communists,” followed by three decades of Suharto’s despotic rule.

Beauty Is a Wound astonishes from its opening line: “One afternoon on a weekend in May, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years…” Drawing on local sources—folk tales and the all-night shadow puppet plays, with their bawdy wit and epic scope—and inspired by Melville and Gogol, Kurniawan’s distinctive voice brings something luscious yet astringent to contemporary literature.

Man Tiger (2004)

by Eka Kurniawan, translated by Labodalih Sembiring

Year Published: 2004, English version in 2015
Storygraph Categories:
fiction, contemporary, magical realism, mysterious, reflective, slow-paced
Importance: long listed for the International Booker Prize

Summary:

A wry, affecting tale set in a small town on the Indonesian coast, Man Tiger tells the story of two interlinked and tormented families and of Margio, a young man ordinary in all particulars except that he conceals within himself a supernatural female white tiger. The inequities and betrayals of family life coalesce around and torment this magical being. An explosive act of violence follows, and its mysterious cause is unraveled as events progress toward a heartbreaking revelation.

Lyrical and bawdy, experimental and political, this extraordinary novel announces the arrival of a powerful new voice on the global literary stage.

Apple & Knife (2018)

by Intan Paramaditha, translated by Stephen J. Epstein

Year Published: 2018
Storygraph Categories:
fiction, horror, short stories, dark, medium-paced
Language: Bahasa Indonesia
You may want to check content warnings before reading

Summary:

Inspired by horror fiction, myths and fairy tales, Apple and Knife is an unsettling ride that swerves into the supernatural to explore the dangers and power of occupying a female body in today’s world.

These short fictions set in the Indonesian everyday—in corporate boardrooms, in shanty towns, on dangdut stages—reveal a soupy otherworld stewing just beneath the surface. Sometimes wacky and always engrossing, this is subversive feminist horror at its best, where men and women alike are arbiters of fear, and where revenge is sometimes sweetest when delivered from the grave.

Mara finds herself brainstorming an ad campaign for Free Maxi Pads, with a little help from the menstruation-eating hag of her childhood. Jamal falls in love with the rich and powerful Bambang, but it is the era of the smiling general and, if he’s not careful, he may find himself recruited to Bambang’s brutal cause. Solihin would give anything to make dangdut singer Salimah his wife – anything at all.

In the globally connected and fast-developing Indonesia of Apple and Knife, taboos, inversions, sex and death all come together in a heady, intoxicating mix full of pointed critiques and bloody mutilations. Women carve a place for themselves in this world, finding ways to subvert norms or enacting brutalities on themselves and each other.

Final thoughts

I hope you found something of interest in this list of books written by Indonesian authors.

I’m always looking for more suggestions of books to read. If you have a favourite book written by an Indonesian author, please feel free to share it in a comment below!

Have you read any of these books? What did you think of the book?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below.

May 19, 2023May 30, 2023

Around the world in books: Five books from Indian authors

Have you ever wanted to visit India? Here’s your chance to visit India through reading!

As long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to visit India. I haven’t had the chance yet, but I know one day I will end up going. But until that time I will continue reading books from India to learn more about the country and it’s culture.

Interestingly, English is the second official language of India, with Hindi being the first official language. There are also an additional 22 scheduled languages considered official languages for use in government proceedings. These 22 languages are either widely spoken or considered an official language at a state-level.

India has a very diverse language landscape. There are 122 major languages, with an additional 1,599 used in India. In the 2018 census, there was a total of 19,569 unique mother tongues listed on the census. But a vast majority, 96.71%, of the population have one of the scheduled languages as their mother tongue (Source).

Since there are so many languages used within India, you’ll notice that Indian literature spans many languages. Many Indian authors also write books in English. You’ll see a similar diversity in the books listed below.

I believe this also poses unique accessibility barriers for Indian literature. Books written in English are easily accessible to the rest of the English speaking world, but often times the lesser known languages may have difficulty getting translated.

Five books from Indian authors

Here’s a list of five books with Indian authors.

The Crooked Line: Terhi Lakir by Ismat Chughtai (1944) – translated from Urdu
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (1997) – written in English
Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh (2008) – written in English
Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree (2018) – translated from Hindi
Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi (2019) – written in English

They are listed in order of when they were published. Keep reading to find out more about each one.

The Crooked Line: Terhi Lakir (1944)

by Ismat Chughtai, translated from Urdu by Tahira Naqvi

Year Published: 1944 (English version in 1995)
Storygraph Categories: fiction, lgbtqia+, emotional, reflective, slow-paced
Importance: An influential work of Urdu fiction from a feminist writer of that time

Summary:

In India’s colonial past, in a time of political and social revolution, Ismat Chughtai masterfully unfolds her magna opus, The Crooked Line: the semi-autobiographical tale of a fiery-spirited, middle-class Muslim girl bent on exploring the shape and nature of consuming desire. Writing with the same honesty and passion as her scandalous short-story, “The Quilt,” Chughtai exposes the complex relationships developed between women living and working in relative seclusion, and the intellectual and emotional contradictions lying in the heart of a rebellious country on the brink of independence from the British Raj and ultimately Partition.

The God of Small Things (1997)

by Arundhati Roy, written in English

Year Published: 1997
Storygraph Categories: fiction, classics, historical, literary, emotional, reflective, sad, slow-paced
Importance: Winner of the Booker Prize in 1997, and the Dublin Literary Award Nominee in 1999

Summary:

Compared favorably to the works of Faulkner and Dickens, Arundhati Roy’s debut novel is a modern classic that has been read and loved worldwide. Equal parts powerful family saga, forbidden love story, and piercing political drama, it is the story of an affluent Indian family forever changed by one fateful day in 1969. The seven-year-old twins Estha and Rahel see their world shaken irrevokably by the arrival of their beautiful young cousin, Sophie. It is an event that will lead to an illicit liaison and tragedies accidental and intentional, exposing “big things [that] lurk unsaid” in a country drifting dangerously toward unrest. Lush, lyrical, and unnerving, The God of Small Things is an award-winning landmark that started for its author an esteemed career of fiction and political commentary that continues unabated.

Sea of Poppies (2008)

by Amitav Ghosh, written in English

Year Published: 2008
Storygraph Categories: fiction, historical, literary, adventurous, challenging, medium-paced
Importance: Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008
Part of the Ibis trilogy

Summary:

At the heart of this vibrant saga is a vast ship, the Ibis. Her destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean shortly before the outbreak of the Opium Wars in China. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a diverse cast of Indians and Westerners on board, from a bankrupt raja to a widowed tribeswoman, from a mulatto American freedman to a free-spirited French orphan. As their old family ties are washed away, they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais, or ship-brothers. The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, and the exotic backstreets of Canton.

Tomb of Sand (2018)

by Geetanjali Shree, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell

Year Published: 2018
Storygraph Categories: fiction, literary, emotional, mysterious, reflective, medium-paced
Language: Hindi
Importance: Winner of International Book Prize in 2022

Summary:

An eighty-year-old woman slips into a deep depression at the death of her husband, then resurfaces to gain a new lease on life. Her determination to fly in the face of convention – including striking up a friendship with a hijra (trans) woman – confuses her bohemian daughter, who is used to thinking of herself as the more ‘modern’ of the two.

At the older woman’s insistence they travel back to Pakistan, simultaneously confronting the unresolved trauma of her teenage experiences of Partition, and re-evaluating what it means to be a mother, a daughter, a woman, a feminist.

Rather than respond to tragedy with seriousness, Geetanjali Shree’s playful tone and exuberant wordplay results in a book that is engaging, funny, and utterly original, at the same time as being an urgent and timely protest against the destructive impact of borders and boundaries, whether between religions, countries, or genders.

Burnt Sugar (2019)

by Avni Doshi, written in English

Year Published: 2019
Storygraph Categories: fiction, contemporary, literary, dark, emotional, reflective, slow-paced
Importance: Shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize
Originally published in India under the title Girl in White Cotton

Summary:

In her youth, Tara was wild. She abandoned her loveless marriage to join an ashram, endured a brief stint as a beggar (mostly to spite her affluent parents), and spent years chasing after a dishevelled, homeless ‘artist’ – all with her young child in tow. Now she is forgetting things, mixing up her maid’s wages and leaving the gas on all night, and her grown-up daughter is faced with the task of caring for a woman who never cared for her.

This is a love story and a story about betrayal. But not between lovers – between mother and daughter. Sharp as a blade and laced with caustic wit, Burnt Sugar unpicks the slippery, choking cord of memory and myth that binds two women together, making and unmaking them endlessly.

Final thoughts

I hope you found something of interest in this list of books written by Indian authors.

I’m always looking for more suggestions of books to read. If you have a favourite book written by an Indian author, please feel free to share it in a comment below!

Have you read any of these books? What did you think of the book?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below.

May 5, 2023May 30, 2023

Around the world in books: Five books from Thai authors

Have you ever wanted to visit Thailand? Here’s your chance to visit Thailand through reading!

Thailand is a really common tourist destination, but unfortunately there’s a limited number of works translated from Thai. Translating any work is a very time consuming and expensive process, requiring incredible skills in two languages.

Publishers are unlikely to put the time and effort into translating a book when they are unsure if the book will have an audience or do well financially. However, this can cause a negative cycle, where there’s so few options that people are unaware of Thai literature, causing lower demand and reinforcing a lack of access.

Some countries disrupt the cycle by providing funding for translations and increasing access, helping to develop a demand for their literature. South Korea and Japan are great examples of this. Their governments provide significant funding to support translators and translations of literary works, which has greatly increased global access to their literature. You can see this whenever you look up recommendations for translated Asian literature, the majority of the suggestions will be Korean and Japanese. Increasing access has also increased demand.

However, not all governments are able to or have chosen to provide funding for translation. But we can choose to promote and show our support for literature in languages, like Thai, that have fewer translated works. We can show support by buying and reading these books, and just increasing awareness and interest by talking about them.

This is an opportunity to show some support for Thai literature!

Five books from Thai authors

Here’s a list of five books with authors from Thailand. All but one have been translated from Thai.

The Judgement by ชาติ กอบจิตติ (Chart Korbjitti)
Moving Parts by ปราบดา หยุ่น (Prabda Yoon)
Bright by เดือนวาด พิมวนา (Duanwad Pimwana)
The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth by วีรพร นิติประภา (Veeraporn Nitiprapha)
A Good True Thai by Sunisa Manning

Keep reading to find out more about each one. I’ve listed them in order of publication date in their original language (the English version typically gets published much later).

1. The Judgement (1981)

by ชาติ กอบจิตติ (Chart Korbjitti), translated by Phongdeit Jiangphatthana-Kit & Marcel Barang

Year Published: 1981 (English version in 2003)
Storygraph Categories:
fiction, reflective, medium-paced
Won the 1982 South East Asian Writers (“S.E.A. Write”) Award

Summary:

This is the story of a young man who took as his wife a widow who was slightly deranged. The story would probably have ended there had the widow not been his father’s wife…

Fak is the humble janitor of a provincial temple school. A former novice with the prospect of an outstanding career as a monk, he defrocks to help his ageing, struggling father. While Fak is in the army, his father takes a wife. When the old man dies, Fak shares his hut with the widow. As he repels her advances and protects her from a hostile community, he falls prey to prejudice and misunderstandings from his neighbours, and there is nothing he can do to overturn the people’s judgment. He finds solace in alcohol, which ‘liberates’ him by providing oblivion…

2. Moving Parts (2002)

by ปราบดา หยุ่น (Prabda Yoon), translated by Mui Poopoksakul

Year Published: 2002 (English version in 2018)
Storygraph Categories: fiction, short stories, challenging, dark, reflective, medium-paced
ปราบดา หยุ่น (Prabda Yoon) won the 2002 S.E.A. Write Award for another book of his short stories

Summary:

Surreal and puncturing short stories from the Thai master of the form.

In a pink-walled motel, a teenage prostitute brings a grown man to tears. A love-struck young boy holds the dismembered hand of his crush, only to find himself the object of a complex ménage à trois. A naked body falls from the window of a twenty-story building, while two female office-workers offer each other consolation in the elevator…

In these wry and unsettling stories, Prabda Yoon once again illuminates something of the strangeness of modern cultural life in Bangkok. Disarming the reader with surprising charm, intensity and delicious horror, he explores what it means to have a body, and to interact with those of others.

Supported by English PEN Translates.

3. Bright (2003)

by เดือนวาด พิมวนา (Duanwad Pimwana), translated by Mui Poopoksakul

Year Published: 2003 (English version in 2019)
Storygraph Categories: fiction, literary, hopeful, reflective, sad, medium-paced
Honorable mention in the Global Humanities Translation Prize
เดือนวาด พิมวนา (Duanwad Pimwana) is an important women’s voice in contemporary Thai literature

Summary:

When five-year-old Kampol is told by his father to wait for him in front of some run-down apartment buildings, the confused boy does as told―he waits, and waits, and waits, until he realizes his father isn’t coming back anytime soon. Adopted by the community, Kampol is soon being raised by figures like Chong the shopkeeper, who rents out calls on his telephone and goes into debt while extending his customers endless credit. Kampol also plays with local kids like Noi, whose shirt is so worn that it rips right in half, and the sweet, deceptively cute toddler Penporn.

Dueling flea markets, a search for a ten-baht coin lost in the sands of a beach, pet crickets that get eaten for dinner, bouncy ball fads in school, and loneliness so merciless that it kills a boy’s appetite all combine into Bright, the first-ever novel by a Thai woman to appear in English translation. Duanwad Pimwana’s urban, and at times gritty, vignettes are balanced with a folk-tale-like feel and a charmingly wry sense of humor. Together, these intensely concentrated, minimalist gems combine into an off-beat, highly satisfying coming-of-age story of a very memorable young boy and the age-old legends, practices, and personalities that raise him.

4. The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth (2013)

by วีรพร นิติประภา (Veeraporn Nitiprapha), translated by Kong Rithdee

Year Published: 2013 (English version in 2018)
Storygraph Categories: fiction, literary, magical realism, emotional, slow-paced
Won the S.E.A. Write Award for fiction and a best-seller in Thailand

Summary:

On the day Chareeya is born, her mother discovers her father having an affair with a traditional Thai dancer. From then on, Chareey’s life is fated to carry the weight of her parents’ disappointments. She and her sister grow up in a lush riverside town near the Thai capital, Bangkok, captivated by trashy romance novels, classical music and games of make-believe. When the laconic orphan, Pran, enters their world, he unwittingly lures the sisters into a labyrinth of their own making as they each try to escape their intertwined fates.

The original Thai language edition of The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth won the prestigious South East Asian Writers (“S.E.A. Write”) Award for fiction and was best-seller in Thailand. It is translated into English by Thai film critic and recipient of France’s Chevalier dans I’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Kong Rithdee.

Attuned to the addictive rhythms of a Thai soap opera and written with the consuming intensity of a fever dream, this novel opens an insightful and truly compelling window onto the Thai heart.

5. A Good True Thai (2020)

by Sunisa Manning

Year Published: 2020
Storygraph Categories: fiction, contemporary, challenging, informative, reflective, slow-paced
Finalist for the 2020 Epigram Books Fiction Prize

Note, this is not translated, it was originally written in English. The author, Sunisa Manning, was born and raised in Bangkok by Thai and American parents. She also studied in the USA, and has a Bachelors degree in English Literature from Brown University and an MFA (Master’s in Fine Arts) in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Summary:

In 1970s Thailand, three young people meet each other with fateful results.

Det has just lost his mother, the granddaughter of a king. He clings to his best friend Chang, a smart boy from the slums, as they go to college; while there, Det falls for Lek, a Chinese immigrant with radical ideals. Longing for glory, Det journeys into his friends’ political circles, and then into the Thai jungle to fight. During Thailand’s most famous period of political and artistic openness, these three friends must reconcile their deep feelings for one another with the realities of perilous political revolution.

Final thoughts

I love reading translated fiction because it gives you such insight to the way different people live. You may struggle with not recognizing names or terms of things that are uncommon in your country, but you can always do a quick search to find out what it means.

I hope this list serves as inspiration for one of the books you’ll read in the future.

Have you read any of these books? What did you think of the book?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below.

April 28, 2023April 28, 2023

Five modern classic American women poets

Do you want to read more poetry but not sure where to start?

For April, poetry month, I’ll be sharing various poetry recommendations to help you read more poetry.

For this week, I wanted to share five American women poets that are considered classics from the last 100 years or so.

This is the last week of poetry month and me sharing poet recommendations. I hope you’ve enjoyed this series! Please let me know your thoughts in a comment below.

All five of the women poets mentioned below were born in the 1900’s, and unfortunately none of them are still with us today. Each of them are significant both for their literary contributions and their impact on society.

Five women poets

Here’s a list of five women poets who lived in the last 100 years or so:

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)
Sylvia Plath (1923-1963)
Maya Angelou (1928-2014)
Audre Lorde (1934-1992)
Mary Oliver (1935-2019)

I’ve listed them in order of when they were born. Keep reading to find out more about each one.

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)

1917-2000
Won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950
- First African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize
Won the Robert Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement in 1989

Gwendolyn Brooks was an American poet, author, and teacher. She is considered one of the most widely read and influential poets from American poetry in the 1900s.

Brooks started writing poetry young, and by 16 she had already written and published around 75 poems!

She born in the south, but was a lifelong resident of Chicago. Living in Chicago was a huge part of her life and greatly influenced her work.

Her work often centers around the lives of ordinary people, with characters commonly a reflection of her life in the inner city of Chicago. She also conveyed a political consciousness through her work, with reflections of the civil rights activism from the 1960’s onwards.

Over her life, she received many public recognitions of her work. In 1950, she received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her book Annie Allen, which made her the first African American to ever receive a Pulitzer. She was also inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and became the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, being the first Black woman to achieve either of those.

Sylvia Plath (1923-1963)

1932 – 1963
Credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry
Died by suicide when only 30 years old

Sylvia Plath is considered one of the most admired and dynamic 20th century poets. She’s best known for her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar (1963), and her two published collections of poetry, The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) and Ariel (1965).

When Plath was only 30 years old (1963), she died by suicide. She suffered from depression for most of her life and had tried several times to commit suicide. At the time of her death, she already had a significant following in the literary community and has since inspired countless readers and other poets.

In 1956, she married fellow poet Ted Hughes. Their relationship was tumultuous and Plath said he was abusive in her letters. They separated due to Hughes’ affair with another woman.

Horrifically, Plath died by suicide before their divorce was finalized and thus her entire estate and all her written work were inherited by Hughes. When Ariel was published after her death, Hughes changed the arrangement and selection of poems to be included from what Plath had already chosen. He has also admitted to destroying some of her journals and even lost (probably “lost”) another journal and an unfinished novel. He’s been repeatedly condemned for his censoring and controlling of her work.

Maya Angelou (1928-2014)

1928-2014
Died at the age of 86
Genre(s): Memoirs and poetry
Key books: I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings

She had a far reaching career, both as an entertainer (singer, dancer, actress, composer, and Hollywood’s first Black director), storyteller (writer, editor, essayist, playwright, and poet), civil rights activist (worked with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X), and educator (as a lifetime professorship at Wake Forest University).

Over her life she wrote 36 books, with her most famous being her series of memoirs. Her book I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings, the first in the series of seven memoirs, was incredibly well received and nominated for a National Book Award.

At Bill Clinton’s inauguration she recited her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” and you can see her inaugural poem recited here. This made her the first poet since Robert Frost (John F. Kennedy in 1961) to recite a poem at a presidential inauguration.

She has received so many medals and public recognition for her work that I’m sure I won’t do it justice, but here’s a short, selective list:

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her book Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diiie
Tony Award for her role in the play Look Away
3 Grammys for her spoken word albums
National Medal of Arts given by President Bill Clinton in 2000
Presidential Medal of Freedom given by President Barack Obama in 2010
Served on two presidential committees (Gerald Ford in 1975 & Jimmy Carter in 19977)

Videos of her performing her poetry

Still I Rise read by Maya Angelou
Phenomenal Woman read by Maya Angelou

Audre Lorde (1934-1992)

1934-1992
Died at the age of 58
Key books:
Sister Outsider, The Black Unicorn
Key Essay:
The Master’s Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master’s House

Audre Lorde was a self described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” She includes all these aspects of her identity in how she described herself, because she focused a lot on intersectionality and how each area of her life contributed to her overall experience.

A lot of her efforts were related to social activism, working to confront and address various areas of injustice, including racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia, both through political activist work and as a thought leader. Her written work centered around feminism, lesbianism, illness and civil rights, all of it as an exploration of the black female identity.

She contributed significantly to feminist theory, critical race studies, and queer theory. Her iconic essay “The Master’s Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master’s House” was an early discussion of the intersectionality of race, class, and gender.

Lorde was very vocal about her issues with the first world/white feminist movement and actively worked to confront race-related issues.

Mary Oliver (1935-2019)

1935 – 2019
Won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize
Her work is inspired by nature

Mary Oliver is a well renown American poet. She was declared America’s best-selling poet in 2007. She also won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (for her 5th collection of poetry called American Primitive).

Most of her work focuses on themes of nature and the natural world. Oliver was influenced by both Whitman and Thoreau, as is seen in her clear and poignant discussions of nature. She’s also been compared to Emily Dickinson, as Oliver’s work leans toward solitude and inner thoughts, with a combination of dark introspection with joyous release.

Mary Oliver would often go for walks for inspiration and to help her writing. She rarely gave interviews and preferred for her work to speak for itself. But in a rare interview she said, “When things are going well, you know, the walk does not get rapid or get anywhere: I finally just stop, and write. That’s a successful walk!”

In the late 1950’s, Oliver met Molly Malone Cook, a photographer, and they became life long partners.

One quote that was all over the internet a while ago was:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

It’s from her poem The Summer Day (you can read it here), and it’s much more about strolling through nature and appreciating the little things than grand adventures.

Final thoughts

All these women are incredible and I encourage you to check out their work. All of them shaped the literary world and how we view the world.

Have you read any of these poets’ work?

I hope you’re learned something new and maybe discovered a new poet to read. Now that it’s the last week of Poetry month, what new poets did you discover this month?

Who would you add to this list of classic women poets?

I would love to hear your thoughts in a comment below

April 21, 2023April 21, 2023

Five turn of the century women poets (1800-1900)

Do you want to read more poetry but not sure where to start?

For April, poetry month, I’ll be sharing various poetry recommendations to help you read more poetry.

For this week, I wanted to share five women poets that are considered classics from around the turn of the century (1800→1900). I tried to give a range of options from a few countries around the world.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing more women poets, each week moving closer to present day.

All five of the women poets discussed below were born in the 1800’s and published most of their work in the early 1900’s. Each of them are significant both for their literary contributions and their impact on society.

Five women poets

Here’s a list of five women poets who lived through the turn of the century (1800→1900).

Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949)
Hilda “H.D.” Doolittle (1886-1961)
Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966)
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)

I’ve listed them in order of when they were born. Keep reading to find out more about each one.

1. Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949)

1879-1949
Indian political activist and poet
In India, Naidu’s birthday, February 13th, is celebrated as Women’s Day

Sarojini was both an Indian political activist and poet. She played an important role in the Indian independence movement and had close ties to Gandhi. She even persuaded Gandhi that women should join the famous Salt March (he was initially against it). After he was arrested on April 6, 1930, Gandhi appointed Naidu as the replacement leader.

She actively fought for civil rights, women’s emancipation and anti-imperialism. She was the first woman to be the president of the Indian National Congress (during British rule). Then after independence she was appointed as governor of a state.

Because of her poetry, Gandhi nicknamed her the “Nightingale of India”. Her poetry was written in English (she was educated in Madras, London, and Cambridge). One of her most popular poems is called “In the Bazaars of Hyderabad” from the year 1912.

Naidu’s birthday is February 13th, and each year India celebrates Women’s Day on her birthday to recognize the powerful women’s voices that shaped India.

2. Hilda “H.D.” Doolittle (1886-1961)

1886–1961
American modernist poet, novelist, and memoirist
Wrote under the pen name “H.D.”

H.D. was primarily known as a poet, but she wrote so much more than that. She wrote novels, memoirs, and essays, along with translating a number of texts from Greek. She produced work over five decades, from 1910-1960s.

As a poet, she was known for her innovative and experimental approaches. Her work had strong themes of literary modernism and she participated in the avant-garde milieu era.

She started as an Imagist and for a long time only her early poems were studied. But was an Imagist for a short time and moved on to create many different types of content and developed her craft for decades past that. Interest in her later work was reignited from a feminist and queer studies perspective in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

H.D. was also bisexual, having her first same-sex relationship while in college. Over her life, she had several relationships with both men and women. The longest lasting relationship seems to be with Bryher (pen name for: Annie Winifred Ellerman). They met in 1918 and lived together off and on for a few decades and even continued their relationship after that, until H.D.’s death.

Fun fact. In the 1930’s, H.D. was treated by Sigmund Freud for both her war trauma and bisexuality.

3. Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966)

1889 – 1966
Shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1965
Regarded as one of Russia’s greatest poets

Anna is regarded as one of Russia’s greatest poets. Her father was Ukrainian and her mother was Russian, so sometimes you’ll see her referred to as Ukrainian.

Her full name is Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, but she is better known by her pen name Anna Akhmatova. Her pen name comes from their family lore of a maternal ancestor, Khan Akhmat, who was a Tatar chieftain and is believed to have been a descendant of Genghis Khan.

Her poetic work has significant range, from short lyric poems up to intricately structured cycles. Her style was considered strikingly original and very distinct form her contemporaries, especially with her use of restraint. She was considered an icon of both noble beauty and catastrophic predicament.

Anna lived in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era. Much of her work was condemned and censored by Stalinist authorities. However, she choose to remain in the Soviet Union and act as a witness to the historical events.

Unfortunately, many written records were destroyed during the Soviet regime, especially of those condemned by Stalinist authorities, and so there is very little information about her life.

4. Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

1892 – 1950
American lyrical poet and playwright
Won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Pseudonym: Nancy Boyd

Millay is one of the most respected and successful American poets, and notably, she was recognized throughout much of her life. However, she did write much of her work under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd.

She was also a well-known social figure, feminist, and was known for her progressive political views. She was also known for her riveting readings and performances, which garnered her even more attention as a poet. Within her work, she had both homo and hetero portrayals of sexuality and was known for her descriptions of the female experience.

In 1923, Millay won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (for her poem “Ballad of the Harp-Weaver”) and in 1943 she won the Frost Medal for her lifetime contribution to American poetry. She was the first woman and second person (ever) to win the Pulitzer for poetry.

In the 1930’s, modernist critics dismissed her work due to her use of traditional poetic forms. However, in the 1960’s and 70’s, interest in her work increased due to feminist literary criticism and feminist movements. She regained her reputation as being a highly gifted writer.

5. Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)

1893 – 1967
American poet, writer, critic, and satirist

Dorothy Parker was an American poet, writer, critic and satirist. She was known for her humour, through her wit, wisecracks and social commentary.

She rose to fame in the 1920’s, both from her work in magazines and as part of the social scene in New York City. She was an inaugural member of the board of editors at the magazine the New Yorker and frequently contributed her own writings. She was also a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. A group of writers, critics, actors, etc. that met together everyday for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City.

In 1926, Parker published “Enough Rope”, her first book of poetry that became a bestseller. You can access it for free here on the Gutenberg Project.

She also moved to Hollywood and worked as a screenwriter. She was nominated for two Academy Awards before being placed on the Hollywood blacklist. The films she worked on included:

A Star is Born → for which they were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing—Screenplay (This is the original version of the 2018 movie starring Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper.)
Smash-Up, the Story of a Woman → together with Frank Cavett, she received a nomination for an Oscar for the screenplay in 1947
Saboteur → a Hitchcock directed movie

Due to her left-wing politics (aka suspected of being a communist), Parker was placed on the Hollywood blacklist. Parker was listed as a communist in the “Red Channels” publication in 1950, which was an anti-communist document published by the right-wing journal Counterattack. Also, the FBI complied a large dossier on her (1,000 pages!) based on her suspected communist activities during the McCarthy era. She was also the chair of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee’s fundraising arm and help found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in 1936.

When she died (1967), she willed her estate to Martin Luther King Jr., and upon his death in 1968, it was then given to the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).

Final thoughts

All these women seem like powerhouses. They were all known for being disrupters and social justice advocates.

I hope you’re learned something new and maybe discovered a new poet to read.

I think it’s incredible to see how influential these women were and to learn about their lives outside of just being a poet.

Have you read any of these poets’ work?

Who would you add to this list of classic women poets?

I would love to hear your thoughts in a comment below.

April 15, 2023April 15, 2023

Five classic women poets from around the world

Do you want to read more poetry but not sure where to start?

For April, poetry month, I’ll be sharing various poetry recommendations to help you read more poetry.

For this week, I wanted to share five women poets that are considered classics. I tried to give a range of options from around the world and from across the centuries.

All five of the women poets discussed below lived before the 20th century (so in the 1800’s or earlier).

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing more women poets, each week moving closer to present day.

Five classic women poets

Here’s a list of five women poets that lived before the 20th century.

Sappho
Mīrābāī
Phillis Wheatley
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Emily Dickinson

I’ve listed them in order of when they lived. Keep reading to find out more about each one.

Sappho (620 BCE–550 BCE)

620 BCE–550 BCE
Archaic Greek Poet
Counted among the greatest of poets in Greek Antiquity

Very little is known about Sappho, a well-renown poet from Greek antiquity. Details of her life are often inconsistently reported or are simply unknown.

Additionally, most of her poems have been lost over time, and what has remained are mostly just fragments of poems. Her poem “Ode to Aphrodite” is one of the only complete poems that remain.

But in antiquity Sappho was considered among the greatest of poets. Just as Homer was called “the Poet”, she was called “the Poetess”, and Plato considered her the “tenth Muse”.

She is from the island of Lesbos, and is considered a symbol of love and desire between women as many of her love poems were about women. Due to this, the words lesbian and sapphic were inspired by her.

Mīrābāī (1498–1546)

1498–1546
Northern India
Hindu mystic poet and devotee of Krishna

Mīrābāī was a 16th century mystic poet, with most of her poems and songs about Krishna (the Hindu God of Protection, Compassion, Tenderness, and Love). She considered Krishna to be her best friend, lover and husband.

Millions of hymns are attributed to Mīrābāī, but only a few hundred are considered to be authentically written by her. The rest are likely written by others who admired her. Also, many of her compositions continue to be sung today in India, with one of her most popular compositions being “Payoji maine Ram Ratan dhan payo” (पायो जी मैंने राम रतन धन पायो।, “I have been given the richness of Lord’s name blessing”).

She is also the subject of many legends and folk tales, but with very inconsistent details across them. However, one consistent aspect is that most legends discuss her fearless disregard for social and familial conventions.

Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784)

1753-1784
Died at age 31
Former slave, and first Black American woman to publish poetry
Key book:
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral

Phillis Wheatley was born in West Africa, but was then kidnapped and sold to the Wheatley family of Boston when she was seven or eight. In addition to her domestic obligations, the Wheatley family did provide her with an extensive education and encouraged her to pursue writing. However, she was not emancipated/manumitted (set free) from the family until after she published her book of poetry.

Phillis Wheatley was the first Black American woman to publish poetry, and considered the first to make a living from her writing. Even after she was interviewed by 18 prominent men in Boston to prove that she wrote her own poetry, no one in the Americas was willing to publish her poetry. She was finally able to publish this collection of poetry in London in 1773.

Despite international recognition, she was unable to find anyone to publish any further volumes of poetry. She was able to publish some poetry in pamphlets and newspapers, but only in limited amounts.

Unfortunately, she ended up dying in abject poverty, with many of her poems lost due to lack of support.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)

1806–1861
English poet of the Victorian era
One of the most respected poets of the Victorian era

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was one of the most respected poets of the Victorian Era. She started writing poetry at a very young age and was primarily self taught in the areas of literature and the languages of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew.

She published her first collection of poems as an adult in 1838, and then wrote prolifically through 1841-1844. Her volume Poems published in 1844 was very successful and caught the attention of her future husband Robert Browning.

She was successful and quite popular in the UK and the United States. She heavily influenced both Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allen Poe.

Elizabeth held strong liberal values, especially for that era, and actively campaigned against slavery and in favour of children’s rights (against child labour).

One of her most famous poems is Number 43.

Number 43

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. 
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height 
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight 
For the ends of Being and Ideal Grace. 
I love thee to the level of everyday's 
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight. 
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right; 
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise; 
I love thee with the passion put to use 
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith; 
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose 
With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath, 
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose, 
I shall but love thee better after death.

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)

1830–1886
Amherst, Massachusetts, USA
One of the most important American poets

Emily Dickinson is regarded as one of the most important and original American poets, but was little-known during her life and lived most of her life in isolation.

She was a prolific writer, but only 10 of her poems were published in her lifetime. Her sister discovered her extensive poetry collection after Emily’s death, and her poems were later published by her acquaintances.

Many of her poems were heavily edited before her acquaintances published them, especially with regards to her dedications and references to Susan (her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson). Scholars often interprete this relationship as romantic, but edits were often done to hide the true nature of their relationship.

Final thoughts

I hope I was able to do these women some justice. Each of them had a significant influence on the world and within the realm of literature.

Since this only includes five poets, this is a small sampling of the classic poets. It’s simply a way for you to discover a new poet or learn something new about these incredible ladies.

Have you read any of these poets’ work?

Who would you add to this list of classic women poets?

I would love to hear your thoughts in a comment below.

Five books from North/East Asia

Love in a Fallen City (1946) – China

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Notes of a Crocodile (1994) – Taiwan

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The Housekeeper and the Professor (2003) – Japan

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Human Acts (2014) – South Korea

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Earthlings (2018) – Japan

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Excerpt from The Membranes by Chi Ta-Wei

The Membranes – Summary

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Five classic LGBTQIA2S+ books

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

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Orlando (1928)

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Giovanni’s Room (1956)

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Maurice (1971)

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The Color Purple (1982)

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Vietnam’s history

Historical impact seen today

Five books from Vietnamese authors

Dumb Luck (1936)

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The Crystal Messenger (1988)

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Mãn (2013)

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The Frangipani Hotel (2014)

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The Mountains Sing (2020)

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Bonus Suggestion: Modern Vietnamese poet Bao Phi

Thousand Star Hotel (2017)

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Five books from Indonesian authors

Saman (1998)

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Kill the Radio (2001)

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Beauty is a Wound (2002)

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Man Tiger (2004)

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Apple & Knife (2018)

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