Specialises in: 

Literary fiction, horror, character dynamics.
 

Services offered:

Three month mentoring. 

*Sharlene will be available to take on Mentees from Spring 2019.

​

About Sharlene: 

Sharlene Teo won the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writer's Award for Ponti, her debut novel, which is shortlisted for the 2018 Hearst Big Book Award and being translated into eight languages. She completed an MA at the University of East Anglia where she received the Booker Prize Foundation scholarship, and holds fellowships from the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, David TK Wong Foundation and the University of Iowa International Writing Program.

 

She runs creative writing workshops at university level as well as for various arts and charitable organisations and she would be interested to work on literary fiction.​

​

Ponti:

​

Blurb: 

​

An award-winning fiction debut about the value of friendships in present-day Singapore—a surprising and powerful portrait of Asia that shows the unique blend of modern and traditional cultures coming together—for fans of Elena Ferrante and Emma Cline.

“I am Miss Frankenstein, I am the bottom of the bell curve.” So declares Szu, a teenager living in a dark, dank house on a Singapore cul-de-sac, at the beginning of this richly atmospheric and endlessly surprising tale of non-belonging and isolation.

Friendless and fatherless, Szu lives in the shadow of her mother Amisa, once a beautiful actress—who gained fame for her portrayal of a ghost—and now a hack medium performing séances with her sister in a rusty house. When Szu meets the privileged, acid-tongued Circe, an unlikely encounter develops into a fraught friendship that will haunt them both for decades to come.

With remarkable emotional acuity, dark comedy, and in vivid prose, Sharlene Teo’s Ponti traces the suffocating tangle the lives of four misfits, women who need each other as much as they need to find their own way. It is an astounding portrayal of the gaping loneliness of adolescence, the surrealness of the modern city, and the strangeness of living with and loving other people.

​

Reviews: 

'Everything about Ponti suggests it’s the rare, real deal and Teo’s a writer we’ll be reading for many years to come.' The Financial Times 

 

'Every now and then, as a writer, you read a debut that feels so fully formed and on its feet, that part of you blanches at the failings of your own debut. That moment of solipsism aside, Ponti is one of the most exciting books – never mind first novels – I have read in ages.' iNews

 

Read more about Sharlene's debut novel Ponti here >> 

​

More resources: 

Twitter: @treebirds

Listen to Sharlene on The Riff Raff Podcast

​

Enquire about working with Sharlene.