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Wena Poon is a short-story writer and novelist. She won the 2010 Willesden Herald Prize in England, and has been nominated for the Frank O’Connor Award in Ireland and the Singapore Literature Prize.

Poon’s new novel, Alex y Robert, centres on an American female matador, Alex, and a Spanish matador, Robert. It’s a story of New and Old World tensions; where one woman, Alex, wants to become a matador, and a matador, Robert, who wants out of the game.

Robert is the matador hero in Spain, despite the fact he is often mistaken for a bus-boy by American tourists. Alex is the fearless female matador in a world where the best thing for a woman to do is to be beautiful, shut up and watch.

Intrigued by a friend who watched droves of American tourists leave bull-fights en masse, Poon was encouraged to write a story about why the bullfight is both enchanting and repulsive. Poon also wanted to write something lively and non-technical, citing the fact that when she was faced with research, long, encyclopaedic books the length of your arm were in abundance. (You got the feeling she wasn’t exactly enamoured by books like Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon. Neither was I.)

In Alex y Robert, Poon turned the subject of bull-fighting on its head by deciding to look at bull-fighting from a female matador’s perspective. When interviewing the matadors about why there were so few women in the profession, they said that women didn’t belong in this realm because of their physique and emotionality, even because of their menstrual cycles. Poon found some of these arguments to be similar to the ones that were invoked in keeping women out of the legal profession in the 1950′s.

(Poon is a lawyer in Austin, Texas, and in her spare time she has so far written four novels. Asked whether she believes her day-job has influenced the way she writes, Poon said that just as she demystifies the law for her clients, she wants to demystify literature for her readers. Happily, much of the time out of work is spent writing, and you got the feeling this was a very beneficial relationship on both sides, though at a Prize-giving once she was negotiating a bond trade on the phone and then dashing up to the podium to do a reading.)

Poon said she also wanted to write Alex y Robert as a novel that was firmly rooted in the 21st century; that didn’t ignore the presence of WIFI, Facebook and Twitter in most people’s lives. When asked if she thought too many writers ignored what most people do day-to-day, Poon said that you couldn’t show ordinary life now and hope to ignore computers and phones.

Alex y Robert was a departure from what might have been expected of Poon. She was asked by an editor if she could write another Wild Swans, a cross-generational saga set internationally. By writing a European love-story with Spanish and American characters, Poon argues that she is challenging the assumption that Asian women writer’s can only concentrate on Asian women: the type of book that cues jackets of mournful women – with sari, bound feet or kimono, take your pick – and which Poon calls “geisha fiction”.

Still, she said she continues to be interested in writing about “Chinese people in strange places”, and her stories concentrate on the Chinese diaspora across the UK, Europe and the States. To help her along with her task, Poon draws on her experiences living in Singapore, Hong Kong, New York, Boston, San Francisco , Boston and now Texas.

Poon is also the author of Lions in Winter, The Proper Care of Foxes, The Biophilia Omnibus and Alex y Robert. About Lions in Winter, TIME magazine said “The exile returns to illuminate an intimate part of Singapore, and does so quite beautifully.”

Alex y Robert is available from Saltpublishing.com.

Filed under: London Literature Festival 2010