Siang Lu is the Miles Franklin-winning author of Ghost Cities and The Whitewash, the co-creator of The Beige Index and the creator of @sillybookstagram. Ghost Cities has been shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal, the Russell Prize for Humour Writing, the VPLA John Clarke Humour Award, the Readings New Australian Fiction Prize and the University of Queensland Fiction Book Award and The Courier-Mail People's Choice Queensland Book of the Year at the Queensland Literary Awards. The Whitewash won the ABIA Audiobook of the Year in 2023. In 2023 Siang was named one of the Top 40 Under 40 Asian-Australians at the Asian Australian Leadership Awards. He is based in Brisbane, Australia, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Why do you tell stories?

The answer is complex – also, before that, why do we read stories? – but it’s got something to do with having been a reader first, having fallen in love with, fallen for, great literature. Works that are meaningful. And hopefully, with sufficient skill, replicating that feeling in turn so that others might fall in love with, fall for, find sufficient meaning within the pages. And then imagine that reader in turn with your book, so struck, because now they are desirous to recreate that feeling, to tell their own stories, and so on…

All literature is an uninterrupted conga line of writers seducing readers into becoming writers.

I could answer this question in eight other different ways, but in the end there’s also the real answer beneath it all, which is: to reveal while hiding; to hide while revealing.

Without talking about plot in any way, what would you say your book is about?

Ghost Cities is about a young Chinese-Australian man named Xiang – no relation to me – who works at the Chinese Consulate as a translator when he’s fired because it’s been discovered that he is in fact monolingual, and has been relying on Google Translate to do his job.

Ghost Cities is a dual timeline novel, with each timeline featuring its own dictator who issues ever more ludicrous and cruel edicts for their hapless subjects to obey. What did you want to say about dictators who are obsessed with controlling the stories about themselves?

A reader pointed this out to me – and it’s sometimes wondrous the secrets that are revealed to the writer long after the fact – that the only characters in this book who end up with any sense of purpose or agency are the ones who realise that they must tell their own stories.

 In the modern-day timeline the characters end up in Port Man Tou, a ghost city that director Baby Bao has turned into a giant, living film set where there are “eleven CCTV cameras for every person” and everybody could be watched all the time but never knows when or who is watching, in a kind of panopticon situation. Baby Bao says the people have embraced it – which of course made me think of how we put our lives on social media. Have we embraced the panopticon?

Sort of. Tricked into the opt-in panopticon through our desire for likes.

But in order for it to be a real panopticon – and please, God no – everyone would have to start sharing everything else about their lives. Not only the highlights, but the lowlights and everything in between.

There are stories within stories in Ghost Cities, down to an actual labyrinth where the walls are stories. How did you keep track of all the layers of story while you were writing?

Intuition. Pure Pantsing intuition. The plotters would’ve torn their hair out.

With its absurdist political satire elements, Ghost Cities is that rare creature, a Miles Franklin winner that’s laugh-out-loud funny. Why do you gravitate to comedy to say the things you want to say? 

It’s sort of just a self-defence mechanism, I reckon, built up over a lifetime of… being defensive.

Defensive about what, you say?

Don’t be so curious!

Your novel features an escape from the six levels of hell, a prison where the Emperor sends people who displease him. Who would you send to the six levels of hell?  

Anyone who, with their actions, has shown themselves to be un-generous.

What were you under the influence of (books, authors, ideas, art, or anything else) while writing this book?

The book has many debts – Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics and Invisible Cities, the folk tales that comprise the One Thousand and One Nights, the works of Borges, Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s theory of the migration of myth – all of which Ghost Cities wears on its sleeve.

Which adjectives by readers and reviewers used to describe your writing, most please you?

I don’t know what this says about me, but I’m always more flattered if someone tells me they found my book ‘funny’, as opposed to they found it ‘good’. Hopefully both, though.

I also sort of perversely like ‘DNF’, because it tells me a story about the reader, who, in their stubbornness, decided to wrestle for a bit. They were open minded! They persevered with the book until they were totally sure that it was ‘not funny’ and ‘not good’ – and that’s entirely their valid judgment – before putting it down, and picking up something better. Hey. They tried! Don’t say they didn’t try! And to me, ‘DNF’ is always better than ‘DNS’.

Tell us about your natural writing habitat.

Anywhere. Everywhere.