The works of four Filipino authors, Miguel Syjuco, Glenn Diaz, Johoanna Lynn Cruz and Elaine Laforteza were included in New Asia Now, edited by Julianne Schultz and Jane Camens. New Asia Now is published by Griffith Review, Australia’s leading quarterly of culture and ideas.
Featuring 49 authors born after 1970, New Asia Now takes a journey through the region’s diversity, featuring a new generation of literary stars and agenda setters who will shape the way we understand the complexities of culture.
The contributors to New Asia Now and the accompanying e-book, published in parallel with an edition of the Asia Literary Review, are citizens of a very different world to the one their parents knew. As a generation, despite national and regional differences, they have grown up during a period of extraordinary change: countries decolonised, civil wars fought and won, political systems turned inside out, authoritarian states fallen to democracies. In the process, relentless economic growth has lifted the standard of living at an unprecedented pace, and has created the largest middle class the world has ever known.
The enormity of this transformation cannot be overestimated, and these writers chip away at what it means in country after country, in family and community, for the diasporas and those who stayed in traditional homelands.
In September 2015, Miguel Syjuco will join Sheng Keyi (China) and Annie Zaidi (India) on an Australian tour. Events have been scheduled for Byron Bay Writers Festival, National Library of Australia in Canberra, Sydney Ideas and Melbourne Writers Festival.
About the Filipino authors
Miguel Syjuco is the author of the novel Ilustrado (Vintage Australia, 2010) which won the Man Asian Literary Prize and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He writes about topics unsuitable for the polite dinner table: politics, religion, sex and human folly. His forthcoming second novel, I Was the President’s Mistress!!, trains its crosshairs on the powerful and corrupt in his home country.
Glenn L Diaz has an MA in creative writing from the University of the Philippines. He is the 2013 recipient of the M Literary Residency in Bangalore, India. He lives in Manila.
Jhoanna Lynn B Cruz’s first book, Women Loving. Stories and a Play (Anvil Publishing, 2010), is the first single-author anthology of lesbian-themed writing in the Philippines. Her writing has won the Philippines’ prestigious Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. She is currently associate professor at the University of the Philippines Mindanao in Davao City.
Elaine Laforteza is a Cultural Studies lecturer at Macquarie City Campus and Communications tutor at the University of Technology, Sydney. She writes for The Philippine Community Herald. Her book, The Somatechnics of Whiteness and Race, was published in May 2015 by Ashgate.
