Delicious Hunger by Hai Fan and Jeremy Tiang first from Singapore to win PEN Translates award

SINGAPORE – A collection of short stories by former Malayan Communist Party (MCP) fighter Hai Fan, translated by Singapore Literature Prize winner Jeremy Tiang, has become the first book from Singapore to win the PEN Translates award.

Delicious Hunger (2024), published by the United States’ Tilted Axis Press, is among 16 titles from around the world recognised by human rights organisation English PEN on July 18.

The winners were selected from the prize’s largest round of submissions since it was launched in 2012 with support from Arts Council England. Titles include inaugural winners from not just Singapore, but also Cameroon, as well as, for the first time, works translated from Greenlandic and Kannada.

First published in Chinese as Ke Kou De Ji E in 2017, Delicious Hunger draws from Singapore-born Hai Fan’s experiences as a communist guerilla fighter in Thailand’s rainforests from 1976 to 1989.

The title evokes the sensory world of food as experienced by these soldiers hungry for a better world after Malaysia and Singapore’s independence. It begins with the title story of two men enjoying their last civilian meal at a newly opened Kentucky Fried Chicken, and later the soldiers making delicious cakes from improvised ingredients such as cassava and elephant fat.

There is room, too, for the magical and heartrending in the collection, which will be available in bookshops here in September: a woman wins the approval of her comrades when she finds a mythical mousedeer and two comrades struggle to declare their love for each other.

Tiang, who authored State Of Emergency (2017), also about the leftist movement, translated the bulk of Delicious Hunger during the Covid-19 pandemic while holed up in his New York apartment.

Compared with other literature about the MCP, “immediately, this felt different”, he wrote in an essay for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in the US. “While the influence of socialist realism was present, this was richer, more gripping. I knew almost right away that I wanted to translate this book.”

In the same essay, part of the workshop’s project The Rainforest Speaks: Reimagining The Malayan Emergency (2023), he wrote of the juxtaposition of “plugging away at my desk, looking out over the city as my cat glared balefully at me from her windowsill perch” as he translated these stories of communitarian living.

Tiang himself entered the rainforest in 2011 to research State Of Emergency, which won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018. In 2023, he also became the first Singaporean to make the International Booker Prize longlist for his translation of Chinese author and playwright Zou Jingzhi’s Ninth Building.

“I thought about how the comrades were hardly ever alone. No matter what they did in the rainforest – planting crops, going on patrol, working in camp – there were always other people around. In his writing, Hai Fan vividly evokes the material reality of life in the rainforest, from moments of extremity (comrades felled by enemy fire or maimed by land mines) to more quotidian times (the regular business of chores and sentry duty, foraging for medicinal herbs, the paucity of hygiene supplies).”

Tiang confesses that he himself struggled with slippage into the language of the dominant narrative during the translation process, which Hai Fan duly corrected. It was not a communist “surrender” in 1989, but rather a peace treaty signed between the Thai and Malaysian governments with the MCP. There was no “insurgency”, but a “movement”.

“Translating contested narratives requires a certain amount of vigilance,” he said.

Head of literature programmes at English PEN Will Forrester praised the winners’ “breadth, boldness, originality, risk-taking, spirit and quality”.

English PEN translation advisory co-chair So Mayer says: “The works showcase the continued invention and ambition of independent publishers and translators, and how the most vivacious and essential current writing is both formally inventive and expansively committed to solidarity.”

From South-east Asia, two Vietnamese feminist mysteries – Water: A Chronicle by Ngoc Tu Nguyen and Elevator In Saigon by Thuan, both translated by Nguyen An Ly – are also in the list of winners.

The award funds up to 75 per cent of translation costs for selected projects. When a publisher’s annual turnover is less than £500,000 (S$869,000), English PEN also considers supporting 100 per cent of translation costs.