5. Who is Jon Gresham?
- Jon Gresham’s stories reflect his mixed identity. He is an adopted and adopting, biracial, eclectic, blessed, Eurasian.
- Born in Manchester, England, later when he was eleven years old his family emigrated to Adelaide, Australia, where he went to school and University.
- In 1995, he left his job in Sydney. After travelling through China he took the Trans Siberian railway to Russia and ended up in England seeking a creative career and trying to write stories. But things didn't work out. He went back to Australia and gave up writing stories for many years.
- He moved to Thailand in 1999 to work on large corporate debt restructurings and relocated to Singapore in late 2002. In mid 2007 he joined an investment bank. He was not writing stories at all.
- He began to write again in 2010 when he walked into BooksActually, then at Club Street, and saw a copy of Ceriph Issue Zero. He decided to submit a story written in 1997 called We Rose Up Slowly. Much to his surprise and joy, the story was accepted for Ceriph Issue One. That story leads this debut collection.
- Since 2010 his stories, flash fiction and prose poems have been published widely in Singaporean anthologies and journals including A Luxury We Cannot Afford, From the Belly of the Cat, Eastern Heathens, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, the Twenty- Four Flavours flash fiction series and Coast.
- When he was made redundant at the start of 2014 he needed a complete change and decided to revise and write several new stories, which turned into this collection, We Rose Up Slowly.
- Apart from writing stories, he is a street and portrait photographer, and blogs at www.igloomelts.com
- Jon Gresham volunteered at HOME (Humanitarian Organisation for Migrant Economics) in Geylang in 2015 to research an ongoing long term book project on foreign workers in Singapore. One of his photo stories on a foreign worker features in This is Not a Safety Barrier, Ethos Books 2016.
- Jon Gresham leads the Writing the City Creative Writing Workshop.
- He is also a Director of Sing Lit Station, a literary community in Singapore.
- More about Jon Gresham here.
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