Poet, Novelist, & Festival Director
Author of seven books of poetry and prose.
In 1998, she began organising literary events in Kuala Lumpur and in 2005, founded Readings, the longest-running live literary platform in Kuala Lumpur.
In 2011, she was Festival Director for the Writers Unlimited Tour Kuala Lumpur/Makassar and was the Festival Director of the George Town Literary Festival in Penang (2011 – 2018) which won the London Book Fair’s International Excellence Awards 2018. She was also the co-founder of PEN Malaysia.
Once We Were There
(Novel). Epigram Books. 2017. ISBN 9789814785167.
Caught up in the underground pulse of Kuala Lumpur during one of its most tumultuous periods, small-time news reporter Delonix Regia chances upon cultured and irresistible Omar amidst the upheaval of the Reformasi movement. As the city roils around them, they find solace in love, marriage, and then parenthood. But when their daughter Alba is kidnapped, turmoil once again threatens to irreparably upend their lives. By turns heart-breaking and suspenseful, Once We Were There is a novel of profound insight. It is Bernice Chauly at her very best.
“A love song to thwarted motherhood and the blunted dreams of the Reformasi movement, Once We Were There is as Malaysian as teh tarik–sweet, dark and a jolt to the senses.”
– Mei Fong, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author of One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment
Growing Up With Ghosts
(Memoir). Matahari Books. 2011. ISBN 978-9834484583.
She is Chinese, he is Punjabi. It is 1966. Loh Siew Yoke and Surinder Singh fall in love and marry but face opposition from their families. Their first child brings peace, but tragedy soon strikes.
Haunted by the untimely death of her father, Malaysian writer Bernice Chauly embarks on a journey to unravel the mystery surrounding a curse that is thought to have plagued her family. She traces a hundred years of her family history to Fatshan, China and Verka, India to recount and relive her ancestors lives against the histories of India, China, Singapore and Malaya. Through prose, letters and journals in different voices, the author creates a layered portrait of how two families traversed time to collide through love and death.
‘Growing up with Ghosts’ is a moving memoir of the author coming to terms with grief, history and bloodlines.
Incantations/Incarcerations
(Poetry). Gerakbudaya. 2019. ISBN 9789670311418.
Incantations/Incarcerations is a rumination on ageing, menopause, losing one’s children to the world, climate change, and the slow decline of the body. In this collection, Bernice Chauly will once again chart the unsayable and the confessional, and speak from places where few dare to write from – of the older woman, desire and loneliness, and of the certainty of death.
By the Book podcast: Bernice Chauly’s Incantations, Incarcerations (BFM, The Business Station, 2019)
Onkalo
(Poetry). Math Paper Press. 2013. ISBN 978-9810776725.
Onkalo (meaning ‘cave’ or ‘cavity’) is the world’s first spent nuclear repository, currently being built on the west coast of Finland. Built to last 100,000 years, it will be humanity’s most ambitious yet feared monument. Chauly’s third collection of poems explores the unsayable, of hidden joys and sorrows that delve into the deepest and darkest reaches of womanhood.
“Direct, honest and powerful.”
– J.M Coetzee, Laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Lost in KL
(Short Stories). Oxygen. 2018. ISBN 9789834403959.
13 Short Stories:
Wait. Wife. Smoker. Guard. Coffee. Fall. Drink. Husband. Forty. Child. Cage. Untitled. Untitled.
The Book of Sins
(Poetry). Mulut Mata. 2008. ISBN 978-9834381004.
Structured loosely around the concept of the “7 Deadly Sins”, Chauly’s second collection of poems examine the depth and complexity of human experience, maneuvering its way through a range of issues and events that have left profound effects on the poet. Largely confessional in nature, issues like marriage, motherhood, are scrutinised in the first section of “sins” and further explorations of the self are portrayed symbolically and metaphorically in the middle section called “contemplation”. The work comes to a resolve under “virtues” where an impending death heralds a forgiveness between mother and daughter and prompts a prophetic summation of the themes at work in this collection.
