Former David T.K. Wong Fellows

Presca Ahn is from New York City. She is a graduate of Yale College (B.A. English, with distinction, 2010) and the Brearley School (2005). At Yale, she was a recipient of the English Department’s Paine Memorial Prize for outstanding senior thesis, a Yale Writing Center Prize, the Kilborne Memorial Traveling Fellowship for literary research in England, the Schoenberg Prize in American Literature, the Rossborough Fellowship for feminist projects, and the Light Fellowship for study and travel...

Cab Tran was born in Vietnam and raised in rural Oregon. He studied English Literature at the University of Montana. Along with the David T. K. Wong Fellowship, he also took up a residency at the International Writers and Translators Centre of Rhodes in Rhodes, Greece. He's been published in Black Warrior Review, 580 Split, most recently at www.newwriting.net and was longlisted for the inaugural Paris Literary Prize. He currently lives in Missoula, Montana and is working on a collection...

Born in Vietnam, Hanh Hoang did her undergraduate studies at Scripps College in California as well as at the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris III, and her graduate studies at New York University. In 2004, she received writing scholarships from Saint Mary’s College of California, where she earned her MFA in Creative Writing. Hanh has worked as a Spanish-English bilingual teacher and a French high-school teacher in Los Angeles and Santa Monica, California; as a freelance journalist;...

Nam Le 's debut collection of short stories, THE BOAT, has won several major prizes, including the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Australian Prime Minister's Literary Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Le is currently a Camargo Foundation fellow in Cassis, France. www.namleonline.com Photo by Dave Tacon / Polaris

Balli Jaswal was born in Singapore and grew up in Japan, Russia and the Philippines. She studied creative writing at Hollins University and George Mason University. Her short stories and poems have been published in journals in Singapore and the United States. In 2005, she returned to Singapore and began teaching literature at the Anglo-Chinese School (Independent). During the fellowship period, she worked on a novel set in Singapore between the 1970's and the present. The novel,...

Mulaika Hijjas has published short fiction in literary journals in the United States, Malaysia and Hong Kong. After leaving university she spent two years working full time on a collection of short stories, before doing a PhD on nineteenth-century Malay poetry by women at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Her book based on this thesis, Victorious Wives, was published in 2011 by the National University of Singapore Press. She is from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, but now lives on...

Leaving Norwich in June of 2006, I thought my novel, "Love Like Hate," was more or less finished. It isn't. Returning to it after a few months, I realized it needed more work, and each revision has truly made it better. At 66,500 words, it is still a few months away, at least, from completion. To give myself a fresh perspective on it, I actually started to translate the novel into Vietnamese. "Love Like Hate" is about Vietnam, after all, and if it could convince a Vietnamese audience, so...

Rattawut Lapcharoensap was born in Chicago and raised in Bangkok. He was educated at Triamudomsuksa Pattanakarn high school in Bangkok, Cornell University, and the University, where he received an MFA in creative writing. His stories have appeared in Granta , Zoetrope , and Glimmer Train , as well as Harcourt's Best New American Voices series, edited by Francine Prose. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Sightseeing was published in January 2005 by Grove Press of Michigan. "I...

Lakambini A. Sitoy is the author of two collections of short stories, Mens Rea (1998) and Jungle Planet (2005). Bing has won awards in the Philippines for her short fiction and journalism, including Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards and a Manila Critics’ Circle National Book Award (1999). Her fiction has appeared in anthologies in her home country and in the United States, Britain and Europe. Sitoy was among 21 authors on the Man Asian Literary Prize's long list in 2008 . The novel,...

Burmese-born Wendy Law-Yone is a critically acclaimed novelist whose novels, The Coffin Tree, Irrawaddy Tango, and The Road to Wanting, all describe the psychological effects of displacement and alienation brought about by political upheaval. Wendy’s first non-fiction book, a memoir of her father, the legendary journalist and revolutionary E.M. Law-Yone, will be published by Chatto & Windus in 2011. Based on notebooks entrusted to her shortly before her father’s death, the memoir...

The best thing that happened to me during my year as a David T.K. Wong fellow was meeting David T.K. Wong himself. When I want to give up on the novel I have yet to finish I think of him. As I stare at my computer screen here in Bangkok, I see Mr. Wong's kindly face. I tell him that I've lost confidence and no longer believe that finishing my novel matters. Mr. Wong looks back at me like a Buddhist monk with a twinkle in his eye: So what? his eyes tell me gently. Writing requires a leap of...

I wrote most of the first draft of the ms.titled The True Body whilst on the fellowship at UEA. I'm currently trying out a couple of structural variations whilst reworking the narrative - in between climbing mountains of marking for the university I teach at. Isabelle de Sequeira is a Eurasian woman based in Sydney, Australia. The True Body begins as an account of her search in the funeral decoration shops of Malacca for a papier mache true body for her recently dead mother Ghislaine de...

Since holding The David T.K. Wong Fellowship, I have published several books of non-fiction as well as my Wong fellowship project, the novel Soledad's Sister. The novel was shortlisted in 2007 for the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize, and has been published in the Philippines and in Italy (in translation). It is due to be published in the United States in 2011 along with my first novel, Killing Time in a Warm Place. I am at work on a third novel. I have also since served as Chair of...

Po Wah Lam was born in Liverpool and moved to Hong Kong, at the age of six months. After studying interior design at Brunel University, England, he was the first person to be selected for the David Wong Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. "I am pleased to announce a fully revised version of The Locust Hunter is set for a brand new publication in Hong Kong later this year. The book after all is set in Hong Kong, so in a way it is going home. So I have been busy...