Featured Writers

Welcome to Scottish PEN's Featured Writers section. As part of our selection of new writing by refugees, exiles and Scottish PEN members, we will feature a different writer each quarter.

18/05/10

An Island In A Sea of Snow by Chiew-Siah Tei

Featured Writer
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Chiew-Siah Tei, a member of Scottish PEN, is a Malaysian born writer. Her first collection of prose, It's Snowing (Chinese) was published in 1998. This was followed by a collection of arts and film reviews in 2000, Secrets and Lies (Chinese). She has won awards for her Chinese prose, including the Hua Zong International Chinese Fiction Award and the National Prose Writing Competition. In 2002, she enrolled on the PhD in Creative Writing and Film Studies at Glasgow University. Her play Three Thousand Troubled Threads was staged at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2005. Her first novel, Little Hut of Leaping Fishes (Picador, 2008), was long-listed for the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize in 2007 and short-listed for the 2008 Best Scottish Fiction Prize.

An Island in a Sea of Snow

My appointment as Jessie Kesson Writer-in-residence, a position created in honour of the Inverness-born author (1916-94), at the Moniack Mhor Creative Writing Centre commenced on 1 March. The car that picked me up from Inverness Train Station stopped at the top of where the driveway was supposed to be, now covered in knee-deep snow. In fact, snow was all I could see.
 

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09/02/10

The Americas Campaign: Perils and Potential by Tony Cohan

Featured Writer

Tony Cohan is the Chair of San Miguel PEN's Freedom to Write Committee. We are delighted to welcome him to our featured writer spot for this issue of New Writing, as a contribution to International PEN's Americas campaign. A parallel article by Lucy Popescu on the dangers to journalists in Mexico is featured on the Writers in Prison home page.

The Americas Campaign: Perils and Potential

In 2008, at a PEN conference in Bogota, Colombia, a campaign was planned and launched, focusing on the difficult situation many writers face in the Latin American countries. For those of us in Mexico, the situation bore great urgency, as drug wars, alongside endemic corruption and lawlessness in some quarters, has turned Mexico into one of the most dangerous countries in the world to work as a journalist.

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14/10/09

PEN Kenya – where we are in 2009 by Philo Ikonya

Featured Writer
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Philo Ikonya is an author, human rights activist and President of Kenyan PEN. She was recently arrested and subsequently released for taking part in a peaceful protest about hyperinflation. To read an extract from her piece 'Ringing On My Mind' go to our New Writing page.

PEN Kenya – where we are in 2009

In April 2008, we got working vigorously on the re-birth of a vibrant PEN. Kenya had gone through an election fiasco in 2007 and the country was burning. Many writers in Kenya realised that they did not have a common voice and they needed one. Some of us had been writing but also participating in public life with faith that we could help our country grow. Suddenly, as it happens with politics here and in other parts of the world, we found ourselves helpless and voiceless as the media, churches and other platforms of self-expression had been swept into the confusion.

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13/08/09

Exile House by Tenzin Tsundue

Featured Writer
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We are delighted to open our featured writer page with poems by Tenzin Tsundue, a Tibetan refugee living in India, who already has links with Scottish PEN, having met Tessa Ransford at the Scottish PEN office on a visit to Edinburgh in 2006.

Tenzin Tsundue's writings have been published by International PEN, Indian PEN, and in Sahitya Akademi's Indian Literature, The Little Magazine, Outlook, The Times of India, The Indian Express, Hindustan Times, Better Photography, The Economic Times, Tehelka, The Daily Star (Bangladesh), Today (Singapore), Tibetan Review and Gandhi Marg.

As a poet he represented Tibet in the Second South Asian Literary Conference in New Delhi in January 2005 organized by Sahitya Akademi, Poetry Africa 2005 in Durban and KATHA Asia International Utsav 2006, New Delhi. Both as an activist and a writer, Tsundue fights tooth and nail for the freedom of his country. His writings are published online at www.friendsoftibet.org/tenzin.

~EXILE HOUSE~

-Tenzin Tsundue

Our tiled roof dripped
and the four walls threatened to fall apart
but we were to go home soon.

We grew papayas
in front of our house
chillies in our garden
and changmas for our fences,
then pumpkins rolled down the cowshed thatch
calves trotted out of the manger.

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