DrBeth Yahp

Project Opportunities

Title: Creative Writing

Summary of opportunity:

Originally from Malaysia, Beth Yahp is an award-winning author of fiction and non-fiction, whose work has been published in Australia and internationally. Her novel The Crocodile Fury was translated into several languages and her libretto, Moon Spirit Feasting, for composer Liza Lim, won the APRA Award for Best Classical Composition in 2003. Beth was the presenter of Elsewhere, a program for travellers on ABC Radio National (2010-2011). Her latest publication is a collection of short stories, The Red Pearl and Other Stories (Vagabond Press, 2017). Her travel memoir Eat First, Talk Later (Penguin Random House, 2015) was shortlisted for the 2018 Adelaide Festival Award for Literature (Non-Fiction). Beth teaches Creative Writing at the University of Sydney.

Opportunity synopsis:

Research interests

• Creative Writing: Fiction (Novel, Short Story)
• Creative Writing: Creative Nonfiction (Memoir, Travel Writing
• Postcolonial Life Writing and Literature
• Narratives of Migration
• Malaysian History and Politics/ Political Activism
• Creativity and Writers/ Writing Processes
• Non-traditional Approaches to Research/ Practice-led Research Processes

----------Current Research Projects----------

• Small Pleasures: miniscule travels through Sydney and elsewhere

• New Found Families: Mapping Autobiographical Narratives of Migration, Hope and Change in Sydney and Malaysia

This project aims to research and record the life writing practices of migrant and refugee families in Sydney (as destination) and Malaysia (as a “migration hub” of people—traders, asylum seekers, people traffickers—their stories and other cultural commodities). It focuses on mapping the narration of family histories as narratives of migration, hope and adaptation in the face of geographic, linguistic, political and cultural displacement and instability. Using qualitative and practice-based research methodologies, the project would chart versions and strategies of the family narrative from perspectives of difference (age, gender, education, and evolving cultural practices of family members). I am interested in the strategic positioning of an ‘act of telling’ or ‘coming to voice’ of a particular narrative (and narrator), amidst other more dominant or accepted versions. I am also interested in the circumstances and historical “moments” in which such narratives arise, gain traction and come to dominate, or vice versa. The family as a microcosm of contested autobiographical narrations of self (as individual or part of a group; as private or public; as familial or national/transnational) is fertile ground for understanding contemporary constructions of cultural memory and discourses of trauma, hope and change.