Ronggeng-Ronggeng Malaysian Short Stories by Malachi Edwin Vethamani

Ronggeng-Ronggeng: Malaysian Short Stories brings together six decades of Malaysian short stories. The first story in this collection was published in 1959 and the last few stories were published in 2018. Short story writing emerged in Malaya through the writing of university undergraduates at the University of Malaya in Singapore. Their writing was published in the students’ literary journals. The Literary and Debating Society of the King Edward VII Medical College Union published The Cauldron, the first journal to publish literary works in English in Malaya and Singapore. With the establishment of the University of Malaya in 1949, The Cauldron was transferred to the university’s Raffl es Society and it took the name of The New Cauldron. Among the pioneer short story writers in Malaya/ Malaysia were Lee Kok Liang, Lloyd Fernando and Awang Kedua (Wang Gungwu) and their works were collected in The Compact: A Selection of University of Malaya Short Stories (Hochstadt, 1959), Twenty-Two Malaysian Stories (Fernando, 1968) and The Flowering Tree (Thumboo, 1970). The short stories of Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Siew Yue Killingley, Cynthia Anthony and Pretam Kaur were first published from the mid- 1960s in Tenggara, a literary magazine from the Department of English, University of Malaya. Shirley Geok-lin Lim, who had earlier won international recognition for her poetry in 1981, won the Second Prize for Mr. Tang’s Girls, in the Asiaweek Short Story Competition in 1982. Shirley Lim continues to publish short stories, her own individual collections and in various literary journals and anthologies.