Imagining the Past—Summer/Autumn Season—2025—Claudia Chan Shaw in conversation with Christopher Cheng, Daryl Lim and Siang Lu
Views from the East - Christopher Cheng, Daryl Lim and Siang Lu discuss with Claudia Chan Shaw their novels, Asian histories, and the challenges of being an Asian writer within the current publishing industry.
What led them to historical fiction? And what strengths or weaknesses do their 'day jobs' afford them as authors?
Listen Now
About Powerful Like a Dragon
In this life-affirming picture book, acclaimed author Christopher Cheng weaves the true story of his family’s search for safety in the midst of war, demonstrating the strength of children in the face of the impossible.
Young Shu Lok didn’t know there was a war until it appeared on his doorstep.
Overnight, everything changes. His parents send him away, tucking him into a basket alongside his cousins to be carried to safety.
They travel in search of a place the war does not reach, over cloud-wreathed clifftops, and through cold, hungry nights where a rocky bed and cold bean curd cake are all that await him.
But Shu Lok comes to find that war does not define him. He remembers his parents’ words: be powerful like a dragon. Even if food and comfort are scarce, strength, resilience, and kindness can always be found. Even in the harshest times, dragons can learn to fly.
About The White Wash
It sounded like a good idea at the time: A Hollywood spy thriller, starring, for the first time in history, an Asian male lead. With an estimated $350 million production budget and up-and-coming Hong Kong actor JK Jr, who, let’s be honest, is not the sharpest tool in the shed, but probably the hottest, Brood Empire was basically a sure thing. Until it wasn’t.
So how did it all fall apart? There were smart guys involved. So smart, so woke. So woke it hurts. There was top-notch talent across the board and the financial backing of a heavyweight Chinese studio. And yet, Brood Empire is remembered now not as a historical landmark of Asian representation that smashed the bamboo ceiling in Hollywood, but rather as a fiasco of seismic proportions.
The Whitewash is the definitive oral history of the whole sordid mess. Unofficial. Unasked for. Only intermittently fact-checked, and featuring a fool’s gallery of actors, producers, directors, film historians and scummy click-bait journalists, to answer the question of how it all went so horribly, horribly wrong.
About The Snow in Kuala Lumpur
A tale of two men—fierce adversaries who ought to have been brothers—and two peoples, the Malays and Chinese, who forged a new nation while walking the thin line between kinship and a destructive rivalry
Malaysia in the 1960s. A newly independent nation, full of early promise. On the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, young Ah Tat dreams of a life beyond the kampong. Earnest, bookish and a little naïve, he sees his path clearly: he will study hard at the Methodist school, enter university and one day become a man of consequence. It is his duty to guide his wayward cousin, the darkly charismatic KC, on a similar path to success. But when KC’s fascination with the local triads results in his sudden disappearance, Ah Tat is left with nothing but questions and regrets.
Years later, the estranged cousins are reunited in a much-changed country. Ah Tat, now successful engineer and future captain of industry, discovers KC has become a powerful underworld figure. Vowing to haul his cousin back from the moral abyss, he is instead drawn into an escalating rivalry with KC as the two men vie for wealth, status, influence and the love of the enigmatic June Teh. But could a bizarre weather event stay the inevitable reckoning?
About the podcast
The Imagining the Past podcast series features authors appearing at the Historical Novel Society Australasia biennial conferences or who have been recognised in our $155,000 ARA Historical Novel Prize.
Our hosts, Kelly Gardiner and Greg Johnston, discuss researching, writing and publishing historical fiction with acclaimed writers of the genre in its many forms from crime to fantasy to literary fiction, set in eras stretching from ancient times to the Swinging Sixties, and for readers of all ages.
Subscribe to our HNSA newsletter to be the first to hear of our new podcast releases.