delicious hunger

BY hai fan / translated from chinese by jeremy tiang

Winner, 2024 English PEN Translates Award

From 1976 to 1989, Hai Fan was part of the guerrilla forces of the Malayan Communist Party. These short stories are inspired by his experiences during his thirteen years in the rainforest.

Struggling through an arduous trek, two comrades pine for each other but don't know how to declare their love; a woman who has annoyed all her comrades finally wins their approval when she finds a mythical mousedeer; improvising around the lack of ingredients, a perpetually hungry guerrilla makes delicious cakes from cassava and elephant fat. The rainforest may be a dangerous place where death awaits, but so do love, desire and hope.

Delicious Hunger is a book about the moments in and between warfare, when hunger is so palpable it can be tasted, and the natural world becomes an extension of the body. Deftly translated by Jeremy Tiang, Hai Fan's stories are about a group of people who chose to fight for a better world and, in the process, built their own.

PRAISE

'This haunting series of stories of ingenuity, solidarity, comradeship and futility is an impressive example of history as written by the defeated, but it's more than that too - an almost hallucinatory dispatch from another world.' — Owen Hatherley, a writer and the author of Landscapes of Communism and Trans-Europe Express

CONTRIBUTOR’s DETAILS

Hai Fan is the pen name of Ang Tiam Huat, a Singaporean writer who entered the rainforest in 1976 as a soldier of the Malayan Communist Party and spent the next thirteen years carrying out guerrilla warfare near the Malaysia-Thai border. His publications include What the Rainforest Tells You, the essay collection The Tumultuous Hills and Jungles, the story collections Wild Pathways and Delicious Hunger, and the novel A Rear View of the Rainforest. He now lives in Singapore.

Jeremy Tiang has translated over thirty books from Chinese, including novels by Yan Ge, Yeng Pway Ngon, Lo Yi-Chin, and Zhang Yueran. He also writes and translates plays. His novel, State of Emergency, won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018. He lives in Flushing, Queens.

MORE INFORMATION

• Publication date: 12 September 2024

• Format: B-format paperback (198mm x 129mm)

• Extent: pp. 272

• Rights held: WEL excl Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Melayu, Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese, also excluding South East Asia

• ISBNs: 978-1-917126-02-1  (paperback)/ 978-1-911284-99-4(ebook)

• Price: £13.99 (paperback); £7.99 (ebook)