Getting Published | Short reading and Q&A with author Michelle Jana Chan

In this online session, Michelle Jana Chan will give a short reading from her book 'Song' and then a Q&A session.

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Michelle Jana Chan is an award-winning journalist and travel editor of Vanity Fair in the UK, where she presents the magazine’s digital Future Series. Formerly, Michelle was a BBC TV presenter, news producer at CNN International, and reporter at Newsweek. She was a Morehead-Cain scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. @michellejchan

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Event Agenda:

1. Michelle will give a short reading from her book 'Song.'
2. After this a Q&A session of around 25 minutes for questions in relation to her creative writing process, the book and the publishing process.

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SONG:

A sweeping historical epic following one boy’s long journey from rags to riches, by the award-winning journalist and travel editor of Vanity Fair.

“A wonderfully lush and atmospheric odyssey of survival against all odds.” —Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other

Song is just a boy when he sets out, in the year 1870, from Lishui village in China. Brimming with courage and ambition, he leaves behind his family, hoping he’ll make his fortune and return home. Chasing tales of sugarcane, rubber, and gold, Song embarks upon a perilous voyage across the oceans to the British colony of Guiana, but once there he discovers riches are not so easy to come by and he is forced into labouring as an indentured plantation worker.

This is only the beginning of Song’s remarkable life, but as he finds himself between places and between peoples, and increasingly aware that the circumstances of birth carry more weight than accomplishments or good deeds, Song fears he may live as an outsider forever.

This beautifully written and evocative story spans nearly half a century and half the globe, and though it is set in another century, Song’s story of emigration and the quest for an opportunity to improve his life is timeless.

Chan’s own family lineage lays the path for the tale of Song, as she is descended from indentured Chinese immigrants who immigrated to British Guiana in the mid-1800s. Her father grew up there but left in the 1960s—searching, in turn, for a better life in England.