Tan Twan Eng shares how he was a voracious reader as a child on Booker Prize page

Tan Twan Eng, author of 'The Garden Of Evening Mists', sees translated fiction as a doorway into the lives of people from a different culture. Photo: The Star/Filepic

Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng, whose 2012 book The Garden Of Evening Mists won the Man Asian Literary Prize and Walter Scott Prize For Historical Fiction, and was on the Man Booker Prize shortlist, used to fail all his subjects in school, except English. It probably had something to do with the fact that he was always distracted from the teacher talking in front of the classroom - by whatever wonderful book he had smuggled into class.

"The book (would be) hidden under my desk while the teacher was going through the lessons in front ... I read all the usual books children read: The Wind In The Willows, Enid Blyton books, Biggles, the Narnia books, the Adrian Mole diaries, the Tintin and Asterix books. I was fortunate that my parents never restricted what I read, I could read anything I wanted to, even novels like Lady Chatterley's Lovers, although of course I had only the vaguest idea of what was going on in that book. That's one reason why I abhor censorship of any kind," he said in an interview published on The Booker Prize website.