NEW YORK, September 29, 2016 — Four award-winning writers — Gina Apostol, Jessica Hagedorn, Alfian Sa'at, and Jeremy Tiang — read from their works and discuss their responses to the challenges they face. The American writer, editor, and translator Harold Augenbraum served as moderator. Thursday's conversation was part of the Singapore Literary Festival in New York City. (1 hr., 26 min.)

Maritime Southeast Asia is a highly diverse region whose people are continually crossing and re-crossing boundaries: political, economic, cultural, and linguistic. Four award-winning writers read from their works and discuss their responses to the challenges they face. Featuring Gina Apostol, Jessica Hagedorn, Alfian Sa’at, and Jeremy Tiang. Moderated by Harold Augenbraum. Part of the Singapore Literature Festival in New York City, September 28–October 1. 

Followed by a reception and book sale/author signing.

Gina Apostol's last novel, Gun Dealers’ Daughter,won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award and was shortlisted for the 2014 William Saroyan International Prize. Her first two novels, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, both won the Juan Laya Prize for the Novel (Philippine National Book Award). She recently finished a fourth novel, The Unintended, anthologized in A Kind of Compass: Stories on Distance (Tramp Press 2015). She is working on William McKinley’s World, a novel set in Balangiga and Tacloban in 1901, during the Philippine-American War. She was writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy and a fellow at Civitella Ranieri in Umbria, Italy, among other fellowships. Her essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, and others. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, the Philippines. She teaches at the Fieldston School in New York City.

Jessica Hagedorn is the author of Toxicology, Dream Jungle, The Gangster Of Love, and Dogeaters, which won the American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. Other publications include Danger And Beauty, a collection of poetry and prose, and Burning Heart: A Portrait Of The Philippines. Hagedorn edited both volumes of Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction, and Manila Noir, a crime fiction anthology. Her plays include Most Wanted, Stairway To Heaven, Fe In The Desert, and the stage adaptation of Dogeaters. www.jessicahagedorn.net

Alfian Sa’at is a Resident Playwright with W!LD RICE, one of Singapore’s most recognized theater companies.  His published works include three collections of poetry, One Fierce Hour, A History of Amnesia and The Invisible Manuscript, a collection of short stories, Corridor, a collection of flash fiction, Malay Sketches, two collections of plays as well as the published play Cooling Off Day. He has also translated two novels, The Tower by Isa Kamari and The Widower by Mohamed Latiff Mohamed from Malay into English. Alfian won Best Original Script at the Life! Theatre Awards in 2005 for Landmarks, in 2010 for Nadirah, and in 2013 for Kakak Kau Punya Laki (Your Sister’s Husband). In 2011, Alfian was awarded the Boh-Cameronian Award in Malaysia for Best Book and Lyrics for the musical The Secret Life of Nora. In 2013, he won the Boh-Cameronian Award for Best Original Script for the play Parah. His plays and short stories have been translated into German, Swedish, Danish and Japanese and have been read and performed around the world.

Jeremy Tiang's short story collection It Never Rains on National Day  was published by Epigram Books in 2015. Other work has appeared in the Guardian, Esquire, Brooklyn Rail, Ambit, Meanjin, Asia Literary Review, QLRS and Best New Singaporean Short Stories, and has won Singapore’s Golden Point Award. He has translated more than ten books from Chinese, including work by Zhang Yueran, Su Wei-chen, Yan Geling, Yu Qiuyu and Yeng Pway Ngon, and has been awarded an NEA Literary Translation Fellowship, a Henry Luce Foundation Fellowship, a PEN/ Heim Grant and a People’s Literature Award Maotai Cup Prize for Translation. Jeremy is also a playwright; his work includes A Dream of Red Pavilions (Pan Asian Rep/Theater Row), The Last Days of Limehouse (Yellow Earth, UK) and Floating Bones (translations of plays by Han Lao Da and Quah Sy Ren; Arts House, Singapore). He is a member of P73’s Interstate Writing Group.

Harold Augenbraum (moderator) is an American writer, editor, and translator. He has served as Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, and has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Asian American Writers Workshop, and a vice chair of the New York Council for the Humanities. While he was Director of The Mercantile Library of New York (now the Center for Fiction), he established the Center for World Literature, the New York Festival of Mystery, the Clifton Fadiman Medal, and the Proust Society of America. Augenbraum has published translations of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition and the Filipino novelist José Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El filibusterismo for Penguin Classics.