In the author’s own words, the main aim of Hai Fan’s first collection of writing, What the Rainforest Told You, was to “commemorate [my] time in the rainforest, to present stirring sounds and images from back then in tales like those in 1,001 Nights, so people could hear the voice of someone who’d lived through this period of history and was closer to the truth.”

It’s a romantic evocation of the fantastical Arabian Nights fairy tales, and yet the analogy may initially appear to be at odds with the context from which the author’s writing emerges. For thirteen years between 1976 and 1989, Hai Fan (a pen name adopted by Singaporean writer Ang Tiam Huat) served as a soldier of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP), carrying out guerrilla warfare in the jungle near the Malaysian-Thai border. In Delicious Hunger, a new award-winning collection of short stories, Hai Fan blends elements of socialist tradition with evocative modernist techniques. The result is an almost unreal atmosphere, populated by individuals navigating complex emotions; a rainforest awakens from a slumber, enshrouding the comrades within it in the lush cloak of camaraderie, splintered by bullets and bombs.

Although not explicitly located in a specific time or place, the stories draw from Hai Fan’s experiences of Malaysia’s lesser-known “Second Emergency”: an armed Communist struggle against the post-independence government, lasting from 1968 until a peace agreement in 1989. Seven of the stories were written in the mid-2010s from Singapore, where Hai Fan returned in 1992, and the collection was first published in Chinese in 2017. Independent British publisher Tilted Axis Press, which specializes in publishing innovative works in translation by writers from the global majority, published the English translation in Britain last year, where it became the first book from Singapore to win an English PEN Translates Award. The English translation will be released in North America in June.