A saliva goddess vanishes without a trace from a Taiwanese temple. A Hogmanay party is interrupted by an uninvited guest. In Taipei, an elderly prophet foretells an attack on the subway. A woman walking home from court discovers a sheep tangled in the brambles...Four stories, by four writers, in four languages. Tâigael is a first-of-its-kind collaborative writing and translation project that brings together writers from Scotland and Taiwan to explore language, translation, and culture. Elissa Hunter-Dorans and Lisa MacDonald (Scotland) join Kiú-kiong and Naomi Sím (Taiwan) in stories that cross between languages and cultures — speaking of things unspoken, and finding new and surprising connections along the way.Gaelic and Taiwanese (Tâi-gí) are both languages that have been historically marginalised and suppressed. Tâigael presents two newly commissioned short stories in Gaelic and two in Taiwanese (presented in both Han characters and romanisation), then translates them between the two languages, via Traditional Mandarin and English — opening a dialogue across the languages, traditions, and cultures of these two nations.A book for lovers of folk-tales, for fans of literature in translation, for language learners, and for those who want to slip across the boundaries between worlds.
“When I speak Mandarin with my mother, I am reminded of the distance that separates us—of my foreignness from the person who made me.”In Mother Tongue, Hilda Hoy explores the manifold capacities of language: to shape one’s sense of self, to bring together, to hold apart.Raised in Taiwan by her Taiwanese mother and Canadian father, bilingual from the beginning, Hoy explores her experience of growing up with otherness, and traces how English became her dominant tongue. After many years living in Canada and Europe, her Chinese-speaking self packed into a box and sealed shut, the repercussions of her loss of Mandarin are thrown into sharp focus when her mother is diagnosed with dementia, and begins losing the ability to speak.A tender exploration of grief and reconnection, of belonging and self, Mother Tongue is the story of a journey to locate one’s voice between hybrid places.
Shortlisted for the W&A Working Class Writers’ Prize 2022. A collection of short stories linked by the theme of tattoos.Our lives, our experiences and the people we encounter leave behind indelible marks. On the Bodies of Strangers explores marked lives and marked flesh. The stories in this collection are linked by a single thread: the tattoos of their protagonists, traces of experiences and meaning etched onto their skin. These are stories about the chaos of ordinary lives, about people who are flawed, complicated, but always deeply human. From domestic abuse to unexpected friendship, mixing horror and hope, intimacies and lies, On the Bodies of Strangers explores the many ways we mark each other and ourselves as we deal with the complexities of human behaviour.
