Bernice Chauly is an award-winning Malaysian writer, poet, educator, festival director, and world-builder. For more than three decades, her work has crossed genres and disciplines – bridging the personal with the political, the intimate with the historical.
“I write because I must tell the stories that are not told, the ones that resist silence and erasure.”
– Bernice Chauly
She is the author of seven books of poetry and prose, including Growing Up With Ghosts (2011), which won the Popular Readers’ Choice Award, Onkalo (2013), praised by J.M. Coetzee as “direct, honest and powerful,” and Once We Were There (2017), her debut novel set during Malaysia’s Reformasi era, winner of the Penang Book Prize and Readers’ Choice Award for Fiction. Her most recent collection of poetry, Incantations/Incarcerations (2019), explores desire, climate, and ageing in a rapidly changing world.
A literary activist, Chauly founded Readings (2005), Kuala Lumpur’s longest-running live literary platform, and directed the George Town Literary Festival (2011–2018), which received the London Book Fair’s International Excellence Award for Best Literary Festival in 2018. She co-founded PEN Malaysia to defend freedom of expression and mentored emerging voices through the KL Writers Workshop.
She has held fellowships and residencies with the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, Nederlands Letterenfonds, Sitka Island Institute, Taipei Artist Village, and others. Her practice extends to film, photography, theatre, and teaching, often working with marginalized communities through art and activism.
Most recently, Chauly has expanded her practice into worldbuilding and narrative for large-scale video games, where she developed storyworlds rooted in Southeast Asian histories and mythologies for a global audience.
Born into a Chinese-Punjabi family, her work often returns to questions of hybridity, memory, and belonging – searching for what must be protected, and what must be told.
She currently lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden.
