Thursday, December 10, 2009
Sunday, October 4, 2009
PROPER CARE OF FOXES AT ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL LONDON
LONDON - Wena Poon performs Justin & the Cenotaph, about a Singaporean architect's love for the monuments of Edwin Lutyens and his mother's "personal relationship" with the Queen of England.Hosted by Paul Blezard, the event took place before a sunset overlooking Trafalgar Square and the London Eye.
"I love how I actually wrote a story about Trafalgar Square and I'm reading it, like, right in front of these landmarks!" said Poon, 35. "And I wrote about an elderly Singaporean lady reminiscing about the Queen not being at her own coronation festivities in Singapore in 1953...and I'm in an auditorium which the same Queen herself now uses. It's haunting and ghostly. I even got to see her bathroom backstage!"
Monday, September 7, 2009
In Goteborg Book Fair with The Proper Care of Foxes
After writing extensively about Siegfried Mansfield, a character who loves flying around the world watching his beloved opera, I went to see Turandot at the Teatro Liceu Barcelona in July. In honor of Siegfried, I went to the opera with a big red flamenco flower in my hair. In September I was then invited to read at the Goteborg Book Fair, sponsored by the National Arts Council of Singapore. I managed to score cheap tickets to the Goteborg Opera. Siegfried would have had a box seat, but since the opera I am watching, Goya, is a contemporary production entirely in Swedish, I decided to be more fiscally conservative! Here is a picture of the Goteborg Opera House, it is on the seafront. I had just seen the Goya exhibit in the Prado, in Madrid, in July. What a strange sequence of events.
I have never watched opera in Europe - to have two such experiences within a couple of months of each other is a real treat!
Life Imitates Art
In The Proper Care of Foxes, the Hong Kong auditor Regina keeps running to her old college friend, the cross-dressing vamp Siegfried, in some of Asia's most beautiful hotels. The book will be launched at the Ubud Writers Festival, and the hotel that the festival is putting me up in is the Four Seasons Sayan Resort in Bali. Look at the lovely photo! Siegfried would have approved.
Coincidentally, I am writing a new story for my third fiction book called Liam & Daphne, in which Daphne, the chain-smoking New York writer who first appeared in Foxes, is holed up in a Bali resort during swine flu. I styled it after the Kamandalu Resort & Spa, which I had stayed in many years ago, which is also a festival hotel.
I should keep making up stories. Next stop: Tangiers!
Saturday, August 22, 2009
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