How exciting!
Transatlantic is thrilled to share the cover reveal for DINNER ON MONSTER ISLAND: ESSAYS by Tania De Rozario set to be released by Harper Perennial on February 6, 2024!
In this unusual, engaging, and intimate collection of personal essays, Lambda Literary Award finalist Tania De Rozario recalls growing up as a queer, brown, fat girl in Singapore, blending memoir with elements of history, pop culture, horror films, and current events to explore the nature of monsters and what it means to be different.
Tania De Rozario was just twelve years old when she was gay-exorcised. Convinced that her boyish style and demeanor were a sign of something wicked, her mother and a pair of her church friends tried to “banish the evil” from Tania. That day, the young girl realized that monsters weren’t just found in horror tales. They could lurk anywhere—including your own family and community—and look just like you.
Dinner on Monster Island is Tania’s memoir of her life and childhood in Singapore—where she discovered how difference is often perceived as deviant, damaged, disobedient, and sometimes, demonic. As she pulls back the veil on life on the small island, she reveals the sometimes kind, sometimes monstrous side of all of us. Intertwined with her experiences is an analysis of the role of women in horror. Tania looks at films and popular culture such as Carrie, The Witch, and The Ring to illuminate the ways in which women are often portrayed as monsters, and how in real life, monsters are not what we think.
Moving and lyrical, written with earnest candor, and leavened with moments of humor and optimism, Dinner on Monster Island is a deeply personal examination of one woman’s experience grappling with her identity and a fantastic analysis of monsters, monstrous women and the worlds in which they live.
Tania De Rozario is a writer and visual artist. She is the author of Tender Delirium (Math Paper Press, 2013), which was shortlisted for the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize, and And The Walls Come Crumbling Down (Math Paper Press, 2016 & Gaudy Boy, 2020), which was a 2021 Lambda Literary Award finalist. She was the winner of the 2020 New Ohio Review Nonfiction Contest, the 2021 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Poetry Contest and Singapore’s 2011 Golden Point Award for English Poetry. She currently is an adjunct at the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing, where she attained her MFA. Born in Singapore, she currently lives and works on the traditional unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, colonially known as Vancouver.
Tania is represented by Amanda Orozco.