Malaysian novels in English: Building a local readership

The current generation of writers, publishers, and writer-publishers often work with one another to organise events to promote their books, such as this one, last year’s Kuala Lumpur Alternative Bookfest, which was held together with the Art for Grabs event in Kuala Lumpur. — Filepic

In my previous article, I made the observation that until around 2010, most of the new home-based novels published were heritage novels set in colonial times.

After that year, such novels continued to be written by diaspora writers, but on the local scene, they began to disappear, to be replaced mainly by genre or pulp fiction (eg, crime thrillers).