Description
Fiction. A best-seller in New Zealand and winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Prize, Sia Figiel's debut novel represents an exciting and promising new voice on the international literary scene. It also marks the first time a novel by a Samoan woman has been published in the United States. Lively, spirited, and fiercely written, Figiel uses the traditional Samoan storytelling form of su'ifefiloi to talk back to Western anthropological studies on Samoan women and culture. In doing so, she weaves an honest—and sometimes brutal—coming-of-age story which combines poetry with an exhilarating combination of humor and violence. Told in a series of linked episodes which recall V. S. Naipaul and Sandra Cisneros, this powerful and highly original narrative follows thirteen-year-old Alofa Filiga as she navigates the mores and restrictions of her village, Malaefou, and comes to terms with her own womanhood and search for identity.
"Sia Figiel has written a passion, a song of longing and loss, a song of fire. The young woman in where we once belonged and the world she seeks to navigate are marvels of prose. I do not know from where Sia draws her insights and her language, but I'm as grateful for their existence as I am grateful for the sun."—Junot D íaz
Author Bio
Sia Figiel was born in 1967. Author of novels, plays, and poetry, she has traveled extensively in Europe and the Pacific Islands, and has had residencies at the University of Technology in Sydney, the East-West Center in Hawaii, the Pacific Writing Forum at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, and Logoipulotu College in Savaii. She is also known as a performance poet and has appeared at several international literary festivals. Her first novel, WHERE WE ONCE BELONGED, won the Commonwealth Writer's Prize Best First Book for the Southeast Asia/South Pacic region. She lives in Samoa.
Author City: Matautu Tai WSA