Scottish PEN New Writing

An Island In A Sea of Snow

scottishpen — Tue, 18 May 2010 16:14:39 +0100

Chiew-Siah Tei

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.

Decision

scottishpen — Tue, 18 May 2010 15:44:37 +0100

Rizwan Akhtar

Rizwan Akhtar divides his time between Aberdeen and Essex. He is currently a PhD student at the University of Essex. His poems have appeared in Poetry Salzburg Review, Poetry NZ, Wasafiri, Postcolonial Text, decanto, Poesia, PAK, tinfoildresses, and have been anthologised in Poetry Forward Press, UK.

Decision

I have seen half of Britain
from a rain pattered window.
The nearest tree is stripped,
pavements settle for a mossy outfit,
winter deposits a rusty stanza
on the kitchen's sink

Emigrant Journey

scottishpen — Mon, 17 May 2010 21:53:36 +0100

Margaret Gillies Brown

Margaret Gillies Brown has had eight collections of poetry published {Outposts, Akros, Poetry Scotland, Argyll, Blind Serpent} and three books of prose {Argyll}. She emigrated to Canada in the late 1950s but returned to a Scottish farm where she still lives. She has been a member of Scottish PEN for over 25 years.'Emigrant Journey' was first published in her third collection of poetry Hares On The Horizon (Outposts).

Emigrant Journey

There was the comfort and the all mod-con of home
with its recognisable dangers:
there was the journey,
the endless coming on of the same wave,
the no land time of ocean and high hopes

New world

scottishpen — Fri, 14 May 2010 22:06:26 +0100

Jenni Daiches

Jenni Daiches' published poetry includes Mediterranean (1995), Smoke (2005), and contributions to many Scottish magazines. Her fiction includes Letters from the Great Wall (Luath, 2006). She writes on literary and historical subjects as Jenni Calder. Her most recent book is Frontier Scots: The Scots Who Won the West (Luath, 2009). She is currently president of Scottish PEN.

New world

I know nothing of the voyage he makes
as he sleeps in the chair that never moves.
Through the window there is no change, the trees,
the pattern of people on the street.

I cannot enter that new world,

Migration

scottishpen — Fri, 14 May 2010 21:57:40 +0100

Alan Gay

Alan Gay, a PEN member, is a retired lecturer who lives in East Lothian. He is currently the Convener of Tyne & Esk Writers. His latest collection, The Boy Who Came Ashore (Dreadful Night Press), now in its second edition, commemorates East Coast fishermen caught at sea in the great storm of 1881.

Migration

If I let go I will be lifted
and thrown into the breakers
that roll north across the Forth.

Such a wind.

Don't Answer Your Name In Vain

scottishpen — Fri, 14 May 2010 21:49:07 +0100

Liu Hong

Liu Hong came to study in Britain in 1989. Since then she has published four novels: Startling Moon, The Touch, The Magpie Bridge, and Wives of the East Wind. She has also written short stories and is the English translator of the Chinese novel The Lord of Shanghai.

Don't Answer Your Name In Vain
Tommy, Ortis, Lesley, Bashabi, Ping, Ying, Jun, Yee And Hong? Yes, that's me.

Don't answer your name in vain. Souls have been known to be taken by unscrupulous, wandering ghosts - hunger for identity.

But take it, I say, take it. I don't like my name

Journey To Tir Nan Og, Land Of The Ever Young

scottishpen — Fri, 14 May 2010 21:19:52 +0100

Robin Lloyd Jones

Robin Lloyd Jones, a former president of Scottish PEN and recently-retired chair of its Writers in Prison Committee, writes fiction and non-fiction. Much of the latter stems from his mountaineering and sea-kayaking and love of wild places. Robin is working on a biography of mountaineer, writer and conservationist, W H Murray.

robinlloyd-jones.com

Journey To Tir Nan Og, Land Of The Ever Young
At 4 a.m. the sun filters through my tent. I listen to the ocean lapping at the shore and the seabirds calling. I slide my kayak over dewy grass into pink dawn water. It glides across the glassy surface.

fish splash
profound reflections
vanish

Dust Angels

scottishpen — Fri, 14 May 2010 18:41:52 +0100

Wang Ping

Wang Ping was born in China and came to USA in 1986. Her publications include American Visa (short stories, 1994), Foreign Devil (novel, 1996), Of Flesh and Spirit (poetry, 1998), The Magic Whip (poetry, 2003), The Last Communist Virgin (stories, 2007), all from Coffee House. New Generation: Poetry from China Today (1999), an anthology she edited and co-translated, is published by Hanging Loose. Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China (2000, University of Minnesota Press) won the Eugene Kayden Award for the Best Book in Humanities. In 2002, Random House published its paperback. She is the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council of the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bush Artist Fellowship, Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and the McKnight Artist Fellowship. She is associate professor of English at Macalester College.

Dust Angels

stars, diamonds, tears of hearts
sand and cut, cut and sand
shrouded in silicon fog
we string beauty with corn husking hands

A Place To Live

scottishpen — Fri, 14 May 2010 18:28:41 +0100

Abdul Muqadus

Abdul Muqadus is from Pakistan and has been seeking asylum in the UK for the past ten years. He is a member of the Knightswood-based Framework for Dialogue group. He was assisted in writing this story by Sue Reid Sexton.

Sue Reid Sexton lives and works in Glasgow. She worked as a counsellor specialising in trauma for over a decade and spent another decade working with homelessness. She is the author of four novels including two examining the effects of war on ordinary people and another about complicated grief. She has been published in a variety of forms, most recently in the Glasgow Voices edition of the International Literary Quarterly.

A place to live

When I arrive in a continent, they refuse to have me based on one of three reasons, race, religion, or human law.

It is like God threw me here, as if he threw me on top of a mountain. On three sides of the mountain there are three continents and in each one I am refused for a different reason.

The Americas Campaign: Perils and Potential

scottishpen — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:17:48 +0000

Tony Cohan

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.