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 Sequeira.A true body would give her mother's spirit 'something to return to.' When no funeral decoration maker will provide her with a true body, Isabelle de Sequeira resorts to writing the story of her mother's life and titling it "The True Body." This is a story of loves lost, found and lost again in the narrow streets of Malacca and in the tea growing district of the Cameron Highlands. These were both sites where English expatriate life went on alongside that of Malayan 'natives' in the 1950s, the era of the Emergency and the move towards Independence.This narrative contains accounts of Malayan life penned by the English travel writer Ghislaine de Sequeira falls in love with. However, Isabelle de Sequeira has motivations other than memorialising and accommodating her mother's spirit in her story.She wishes to impress upon her English professor the exoticism of her origins, possibly even seduce him with this.Thus she makes the story of the True Body bear truths quite divergent from those of her mother's life.

PRESS RELEASE - AWARD OF THIRD DAVID T.K. WONG FELLOWSHIP (2000)

Great expectations

The University of East Anglia, long recognised as the home of creative writing, may soon be the birthplace of yet another award winning novel.

Acclaimed Australian writer Simone Lazaroo has won a £25,000 writing fellowship enabling her to spend a year at UEA, where she plans to write her third novel The Meaning of Mist. Publishers have already expressed an interest in the book, which is only just at the conceptual stage.

Simone Lazaroo's first novel The World Waiting to Be Made was awarded the Western Australian Premier's Book Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Australian section of the prestigious IMPAC/City of Dublin Literature Award. Extracts from the book have been anthologised and are now taught at the Universities of Chicago, Sydney and Western Australia. Her second novel, The Australian Fiance, is due to be published by Picador this year.

"As a Eurasian who's migrated from Singapore to Australia, I have lived close to some interesting intersections of Asian and European culture and am particularly interested in the impact of post-colonialism on Asian societies." said Ms Lazaroo.

Giving a taste of what her new book will be about she added, "The Meaning of Mist will explore ways in which the culture, lifestyle and desires of a Eurasian family are affected by their move to a tea plantation in Malaysia, previously owned by English residents."

She is the third person to win the David TK Wong Writing Fellowship, set up by a retired Hong Kong businessman and civil servant keen to help authors - unknown or established - writing fiction in English about East Asia. The previous winners have been a barman of Chinese origin from the Wirral, and an academic from the Philippines, who was once imprisoned for his writings by a repressive regime.

Poet Laureate and biographer Andrew Motion, UEA's Professor of Creative Writing, was Chair of the international selection Panel. "Simone Lazaroo is the latest in a distinguished line of writers to receive the Wong Fellowship - an exciting and original talent who already has a growing reputation in Australia and elsewhere. The judges of the Fellowship were uniformly impressed by her plans for the work she will be producing at UEA, and look forward to welcoming her to the campus." he said.