Wednesday, October 4, 2017

A Perfect Day for an Expat Exit – Finalist 2017 Faulkner-Wisdom Novel Awards—second year in a row!







For the second year in a row, my novel 
A Per­fect Day for an Expat Exit (formerly Taking the Expat Exit) was named finalist for the 2017 Faulkner-Wisdom Novel Award.  *Update:  And again in 2019.   “The Musical Tree”, an excerpt from the novel, was recently published in French.  
 
In 2015, the sequel The Girl in the Bathtub (for­merly Caught in a Mouse­trap: Expats at Play), was also a finalist (and a finalist for 2012 Novel-in-Progress category).  Both are set in Penang, Malaysia.

An Unex­pected Gift from a Growling Fool, was also named a semi-finalist this year, though it was a short-list finalist in 2013!  In the past, another novel The Resurrection of Jonathan Brady was a short-list finalist in 2014 (and Quarter-finalist in 2012 Amazon Breakthrough) and my novella The Act of Theft, a finalist in 2014 Novella category.  At least I’m persistent!

This year Faulkner-Wisdom had 502 full-length novel entries, so competition was fierce.  Although judging can be subjective from year to year, my two Malaysian-set novels keep striking a chord with the judges.  Every year since 2011 at least one of my Malaysian novels has been a finalist or a short-list finalist for the Faulkner-Wisdom Novel Award.  Not a bad track record….After getting some encouraging feed­back from a US agent recently, along with an insightful cri­tique of Taking the Expat Exit that pointed me in the right direction, I plan to rewrite the novel after finishing the first draft of a new book that I’ve been working on.

I’m also planning to do a series of dialogue type of interviews with other novelists that I have met, starting with London-based, Malaysian author Ivy Ngeow who has her first two novels coming out this year (one of which was crowdfunded in the UK).  She had interviewed me back in July after I read the advance copy of one of her novels and has been quite busy working with both publishers.  Should be exciting.

    —Borneo Expat Writer

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