The Life in the Writing Syed Hussein Alatas : Author of The Myth of the Lazy Native

The Life in the Writing is the first biography of Malaysian scholar Syed Hussein Alatas (1928-2007). The author has chosen to reconstruct her father's life by focusing on the very activity which brought his learning to the world: writing. Containing previously unpublished material and rare photographs, this biography also reveals for the first time hoe Syed Hussein Alatas's most famous work, The Myth of the Lazy Native, got published; what his relationship with editors was like, what his connection to Virginia Woolf was, why he liked Sergio Leone and Russian writers, how old he was and what he looked like when his first and last essays were published, and much more. An original and moving book, The Life in the Writing demonstrates how to draw from life the things worth writing about.