Bernice Chauly

Novelist, Poet, Festival Director, Educator

Bernice Chauly is a Malaysian novelist, poet, educator and curator. Born in George Town, Penang, to Chinese-Punjabi teachers, she read Education and English Literature in Canada as a government scholar. She is the author of seven books, which include poetry and prose; going there and coming back (1997), The Book of Sins (2008), Lost in KL (2008), the acclaimed memoir Growing Up With Ghosts (2011) which won the Readers’ Choice Awards 2012 and Onkalo (2013, “Direct, honest and powerful”–JM Coetzee). Her debut novel Once We Were There (2017), set against the Malaysian Reformasi of 1998 has been hailed as a “groundbreaking page-turner on the taboos of race, religion, sex, drugs, and Malaysian politics” – South China Morning Post, and “a stirring, necessary read.” –The Star, Malaysia. Once We Were There won the inaugural Penang Book Prize 2017 and the Readers’ Choice Awards 2018 in fiction. Her fourth poetry collection Incantations/Incarcerations was published in 2019. She directed seven editions of the George Town Literary Festival (2011-2018) which won "The Literary Festival Award" at the London Book Fair’s International Excellence Awards 2018. She is an Honorary Fellow in Writing from the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program (IWP 2014) and founded the KL Writers Workshop in 2015. She has taught literature and creative writing for more than 20 years and is the first elected President of PEN Malaysia.