Meet the Speakers
George Town Literary Festival brings together writers, poets, translators, and artists from Malaysia, the region, and beyond, reflecting the festival’s spirit of exchange and discovery.
Further names will be announced in the coming weeks.
Lim Wan Phing
Wan Phing Lim was born to Malaysian parents in 1986 in Butterworth, Penang. She lives in Penang and is the fiction editor of NutMag zine.
She has two short story collections, ‘Two Figures in a Car’ (2021) and ‘Adorable’ (2025) published by Penguin Random House Southeast Asia.
Shivram Gopinath
Shivram Gopinath is a two-time Singapore National Poetry Slam champion whose work bridges the immediacy of performance and the enduring resonance of the written word. His poems trace the cadences of speech and the silences between them, exploring identity, memory, and the shifting landscapes of contemporary Singapore. He has performed widely across the region, where his presence on stage is marked by both energy and intimacy, bringing audiences into the heart of his stories. His debut collection, Dey (Ethos Books, 2025), carries these concerns onto the page, weaving together the rhythms of spoken word with the reflective depth of lyric poetry.
Madeleine Thien
Madeleine Thien is the author of a story collection Simple Recipes (2001), and four novels: Certainty (2006), Dogs at the Perimeter (2011), Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016) and The Book of Records (2025). Do Not Say We Have Nothing was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Folio Prize, and won the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction, among other honours. Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages, and her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. Born in Vancouver, Madeleine lives in Montreal and teaches part-time at Brooklyn College at The City University of New York.
Tunku Halim
Tunku Halim was born in Petaling Jaya and grew up in KL. He has lived in various countries including the UK, Australia, the Phillipines and Thailand.
He has written 6 collections of short stories, 5 novels, a children’s trilogy and several non-fiction books. By delving into Malay myth, legends and folklore, his writing is often regarded as ‘World Gothic’.
His latest collection of short stories, My Lovely Skull and Other Skeletons, which came out in 2022, was written in Penang and is mostly inspired by his wanderings about the island.
Since moving to Penang he has taken up Tai Chi Chuan and has learnt how to say “What would you like to eat?” in Hokkien.
Reggie Baay
Reggie Baay (The Netherlands) is a writer, historian, and independent researcher. Of Indonesian–Dutch descent, his work focuses on Dutch colonial history in Indonesia and its lasting impact on contemporary generations. His writing is highly regarded in both the Netherlands and Indonesia—particularly The Nyai: Concubinage in the Dutch East Indies (2008), which tells the story of the forgotten indigenous women who became the first mothers of the Eurasian population, and Something Horrible Took Place Over There (2015), which examines the largely unknown history of colonial slavery in the Dutch East Indies. His novels, including The Child with the Japanese Eyes (2018), have been nominated for several literary prizes. As a researcher, Baay has contributed to major exhibitions on the Dutch colonial past at leading museums.