Nuraliah Norasid
1. BIOGRAPHY
2. CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
3. SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
4. SELECTED PROSE
an excerpt from The Gatekeeper
BIOGRAPHY
Nuraliah Binte Norasid is the eldest of three and spent much of her life, growing up, in Yishun, before relocating to her current neighbourhood of Kallang. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English in 2009 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 2015, both times from Nanyang Technological University (NTU).
Her doctoral dissertation comprised of a critical exegesis and a creative piece, which examined marginality, isolation and socio-historical traumas facing the Malay community in Singapore. This work resulted in the manuscript for her debut novel, The Gatekeeper (2017), which is heavily based on the persona of Medusa/Perseus. It won the Epigram Books Fiction Prize (EBFP) in 2016 and went on to clinch the Best Fiction Title award at the Singapore Book Awards in 2018. The book was also shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize in the same year.
The Gatekeeper is part of a trilogy, with the next two books in the series each corresponding with other key characters or dualities in the Medusa mythology: Chrysaor/Pegasus, and Athena. While Nuraliah has plans on expanding the world of Manticura and its races through a series of shorter fiction. However, she has put this on hold at the moment to work on a new novel—a modern fantasy that will delve into the mythos of angelic and demonic figures, the origin and structure of religious thought, and the universe’s creation and conception, against a backdrop of post-apocalyptic Singapore.
Her writing, both fiction and non-fiction, has been published in collections such as Budi Kritik, Perempuan: Muslim Women Speak Out, Best New Singaporean Short Stories, Volume 3, and Eye/Feel/Write II: Building Architectonics. She also has her short fiction published in Quarterly Literature Review Singapore (QLRS) and Moving Worlds. She is currently working on a collection of vignettes with Mynah magazine.
In 2018, she was awarded the Most Promising Asian Woman Writer by IndiaSe Magazine. She also received the Nanyang Outstanding Alumni and Creativity-Leadership-Innovation-Community (CLIC) awards from NTU in 2017.
Nuraliah enjoys brisk walks, during which she would work on story ideas, and stamp-collecting. She is also a gamer, and has been from a young age. Her favourite games are those from the Elder Scrolls series, with Skyrim being the one with greatest replayability for her. She has occasional game nights with her fiancé, where they would play Borderlands, Tom Clancy’s The Division, and Elder Scrolls Online. With a deep interest in issues surrounding inequality and inequity, class and privilege, she hopes that the experiential nature of games can be used to communicate these issues.
Author Biography © Nuraliah Norasid. Author Photo © Epigram Books. All rights reserved.
