Mulaika Hijjas (Wong Fellow 2006), from Kuala Lumpur, studied Literature at Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges where she won a number of creative writing prizes. She went on to study Classical and Medieval Islamic History at Oxford. After leaving university she spent two years working full time on a collection of short stories, before doing a PhD on nineteenth-century Malay poetry by women at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London University.  She has published short fiction in literary journals in Malaysia, the US and Hong Kong.   She has written a collection of inter-related short stories set on the Malay peninsula.  She is working on a novel set in contemporary Jakarta.