Encounters: Modern Folktales from Sibu

by Golda Mowe

Start a conversation anywhere in Sibu about the paranormal and you are bound to hear an original personal or family story. Bujang Senang's work is unfinished. The vengeful Koklir continues to search for victims. The demon huntsmen still hunt with the pasun. 'Encounters' is an anthology of ten short stories based on Iban folklore characters.

118 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2020

About the author

Golda Mowe is a writer from Malaysia who writes about the Iban people of Sarawak. Since leaving the corporate world in 2004 to focus on writing, she has produced the following novels: Iban Dream (2013), Iban Journey (2015), and Iban Woman (2018) published by Monsoon Books, as well as The Monk Prince (2021) by Penguin Random House SEA.

Two children's books also by her are The Nanobots and Other Stories (2015) by Oyez!Books Kuala Lumpur and The Laughing Monster (2018) by Scholastic Singapore. She has registered Goose Books in Sibu and through it has published Fairy Con and Encounters in 2020.

Now she is embarking on a new adventure, with a series of contemporary local stories which will be published in Sarawak. You can read her free stories in Wattpad.

Reviews

[Daphne Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Malaysians love to hear and tell tales about their encounters with supernatural beings and the difficulty in transferring these oral anecdotes to the page is that they are usually just fragments and not whole stories. Golda Mowe has taken these fragments, these brief encounters with mythological beings, local monsters and ghosts, and woven them into stories about ordinary people going about their everyday lives. In her hands, superstition and myth are just threads in life's tapestry, and her matter of fact and simple accounts of personal, human experience allow her characters and the reader to make what they will of the uncanny events that add to the patterns of bright and dark in the big picture of life.

[Cynthia Majinau · Rating 5 out of 5]

The collection of folktales retold in this book includes some that are new to me, but I like how they are retold in a simple way.