Award winning author, Saras Manickam, will be joining Ananke’s eminent list of speakers at the Ananke Women in Literature Festival 2024. With the theme, Language and Erasure, the three-day, digital event will be live-streamed on Ananke’s Facebook page (@FB handle: @anankemag).
Saras Manickam has worked as a teacher, teacher-trainer, copywriter, Business English trainer, copy-editor, and writer of textbooks, school workbooks and coffee-table books while writing short stories at night. Her various work experiences enabled insights into characters, and life experiences, shaping the authenticity which mark her stories.
An award-winning writer, Saras Manickam’s story, ‘My Mother Pattu’ won the regional prize for Asia in the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Contest. In 2021, it was included in the anthology, ‘The Art and Craft of Asian Stories’, published by Bloomsbury, and in 2022, it was published in ‘The Best of Malaysian Short Fiction in English 2010-2020′.
She also won the 2017 DK Dutt Award for her story, ‘Charan’. Some of her other stories have appeared in Silverfish and Readings into Readings anthologies, while one was shortlisted in the 2021 Masters Review Summer Short Story Award. She lives and works in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
“I am delighted to be part of the Ananke’s Women in Literature Festival 2024. Our diverse voices, loud or gentle, from wherever in the world, speak the language of women in our times. The same language of women confronting the truth of their past and present. And refusing to look away,” commented Saras Manickam.
The fourth edition of Ananke’s Women in Literature Festival is set to take place on April 23rd, 2024. Happening in the month of World Book Day, the three-day event strives to create a space, a collective, where a diverse set of voices – especially from the Global South – can come together to share their thoughts, vision, and lived experiences with agency.
Ananke’s Women in Literature Festival will showcase a plethora of conversations that spark impact and mobilize change. The festival aims to initiate discussions and dialogue that give rise to positive narratives. The digital festival is a flagship event of Ananke’s Women in Literature Foundation – An Ananke initiative.
MY MOTHER PATTU
A collection of short stories
by Saras Manickam
published by Penguin Random House SEA, 2023
Nothing is as it seems. Finely textured, humane and deeply relevant, these stories of love, courage, and the politics of identity, race, and belonging, challenge comfortable conventions about ourselves and haunt our minds long after they are done.
The fourteen multifaceted stories in this collection, My Mother Pattu, set in Malaysia, span the Indian Malaysian and other migrant experiences. With unflinching, yet lyrical prose, wholly unsentimental, yet fiercely compassionate, the stories uncover the layers of deception and self-deception that bind the characters as they try to break free from their worlds. The stories speak of all lived experiences over the world, that are shut in and bound by communal pressures. Nothing is as it seems. Who’s a victim? Who isn’t one? Does it matter? With underlying humour, bridging the tragic and the comic, the stories explore family, familial expectations, love, loss, and beyond that, the migrant’s identity, and sense of belonging in a country that may not always be welcoming.
The stories are of everywoman, everyman in different circumstances.
Meet the extraordinary in ordinary people when they confront the truth of their past and present – and refuse to look away. Authentic and unsentimental, each story celebrates the resilience of the human spirit even as it challenges comfortable conventions about identity, love, family, community, and race relations.
Summary
Lalitha, abused by her own mother, learns that bullies carry emotional traumas that scar everyone’s lives.
Shiva Das confronts the truth of his own culpability when his adult special child dies in tragic circumstances.
A woman, deeply in love with her husband, discovers to her anguish that the love of a good man is not enough.
A little boy tries hard to hold his family together as his parents’ marriage disintegrates before his eyes.
A mother has a poignant yet brutal conversation with God about her severely disabled son.
Three young people idealistically reject racial prejudice and stereotyping, only to find that in Malaysia, their future paths are largely determined by ethnicity and privilege.
The extent to which a woman will go in her hatred for her daughter’s childhood friend, ends in a violent aftermath.
An Indonesian maid realizes that the money she sends home has become more important than her own welfare or safety to her family.
A racial slur triggers reflections on friendship, identity, the loss of belonging and trust in a multi-racial community.
