November 2025

Each country may differ in how they present their national storyline. When it comes to formerly colonised countries in Southeast Asia, including Malaysia, most showcase the rise of the nation from early civilisation to colonisation and then independence, and later, its current development.

Despite outnumbering their male peers in higher education institutions for over a decade, Malaysian women remain markedly underrepresented in the workforce.

Somewhere between 2013 and 2015, Penang’s literary scene shifted. Not with a bang, but with a handful of stapled booklets, scrappy covers and stories that felt real in a way mainstream publishing rarely does. At the heart of it is Wilson Khor Woo Han.

One can only imagine the lonely path Siti Zuraina Abdul Majid has travelled as Malaysia’s first archaeologist, and one with considerable academic gravitas under her belt. A returning graduate from the UK, she was only 24 years old when she excavated her first site in the late 1960s.