In the run-up to Merdeka Day on Aug 31, we celebrate local literature with a fortnightly 10-part series on how homegrown English language novels fit into the nation’s story; this is the eighth instalment.
Social problems such as poverty and racial or gender discrimination played a significant role in much of post-1965 Malaysian English-language novels. But the issue of civil liberties was never a subject for literary exploration until the publication in 1993 of Lloyd Fernando’s Green Is The Colour and K.S. Maniam’s In A Far Country, and, in 1994, my novel, Echoes Of Silence.