Bernice Chauly is a Malaysian writer, poet, teacher and festival curator of the George Town Literary Festival in Penang. Born to Chinese-Punjabi teachers, she read Education and English Literature in Canada as a government scholar. For over 20 years, she has worked extensively in the creative industries as a writer, photographer, actor and filmmaker and has won multiple awards for her work and her contribution to the arts. She is the author of four critically acclaimed books of poetry and prose; going there and coming back (1997), The Book of Sins (2008), Lost in KL (2008) and the literary memoir Growing Up With Ghosts (2011) which won in the Non-Fiction Category of the Reader’s Choice Awards. In 2012, she was invited to be writer-in-residence with the Nederlands Letterenfonds (Dutch Foundation for Literature) in Amsterdam where she began work on a novel. She has toured and performed in literary festivals in Suriname, the Dutch Antilles, South Africa, Indonesia, India, Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and the Netherlands. She lectures in English and Creative Writing at Taylor’s University in Kuala Lumpur.