Draft:Maniniwei

Maniniwei – the pen-name of Wǎn-wún Lin (Chinese:林婉文 /ˈwɑːnˈwɛnˈlɪn/ born in 1980) – is a Malaysian writer, painter, and illustrator currently living in Taiwan. She grew up in Malaysia, studied at the Fine Arts Department of National Taiwan Normal University in 1999, and married after graduation. Inspired by her unpleasant experiences, Maniniwei began her career as a writer at the age of 30. Her books center around themes including marriage, parenthood, and family. She composes prose, poems, and picture books. Her works are mostly about herself, describing her hated and abjection in a dark, sharp style. Her first award-winning book Dahulu Parang Sekarang Besi: Pantun Melayu won the Book of the Year from OpenBook and the 35th Golden Tripod Award in the literature category in 2021.

Early life
Maniniwei was born in 1980, in Muar (or Bandar Maharani), Johor, Malaysia. At the age of 19, she made a pivotal decision to pursue her education abroad in Taiwan. She graduated from the Fine Arts Department of the National Taiwan Normal University and later from the Fine Arts Institute of the National Taiwan University of Arts.

After graduation, Maniniwei took on the role of an art administrator in a gallery, where she engaged in copy writing and press releases. In 2009, at the age of 30, she transitioned away from formal employment and began exploring various roles, including aiding her alma mater in organizing art festivals. Despite facing challenges in her marriage, these experiences served as inspiration for her creative endeavors.

In 2013, Maniniwei published her first book Shine on Your Impurities, which received a nomination for the China Times OpenBook Award that same year. Following the publication of her book, she ventured into teaching at a community college. Her course preparations exposed her to diverse styles of picture books, influencing her artistic expression and writing style.

Her works draw heavily from her personal experiences, focusing on family dynamics, particularly exploring the darker aspects of marriage and the challenges of parenthood. Away from her creative pursuits, she is known for her love of cats and dogs, caring for three cats in Taipei and actively volunteering at animal shelters.

Works
Maniniwei's first book was published in 2013, Shine with Your Impurities, a collection of Chinese prose, mainly about sorrow and difficulties a foreign spouse encountered in a traditional Taiwanese family. Maniniwei has published other prose collections since 2013, like I Wasn't Born To Be a Mother (2015), No Avenue (2018), and I Recalled Taipei After Many Years (2022).

She released picture books as an illustrator. In 2016, she published the Oblique Household Trilogy, which included three picture books, The Sea Hotel, The Cat With Old Man’s Face, and After. The sequel of this trilogy titled Oblique Household Trilogy 2019 was published in 2019, and is also composed of three picture books. In addition, she also published other picture books like The Velveteen Rabbit (2017), The Poet's Inn (2018), My Sister’s Empty House (2022) and Princess of Mount Ledang (2022). She even released bilingual (Malay and Chinese) picture books like Mat Jenin (馬惹尼, 2018) and Anjing Makan Angin (吃風集, 2018), and the illustrated handbook 100 Malay Ghosts (2021). In 2017, she published her first poem collection, We'll Talk Tomorrow.

Writing style
Maniniwei is a Malaysian Chinese immigrant writer. Struggling between a mother's duty and her marriage inspired her creation. Hatred is the reason why she writes; she exploits her migration, family, and marriage situations as her writing material, portraying the difficulty of living in a foreign land as a foreign spouse. From prose and picture books to poems, her theme never detaches from "writing herself." In her picture book series Oblique Household Trilogy, her family images in her works often reflect a realistic and unidealized perspective, just an honest description of the imperfections of real life.

Besides that, Maniniwei never worries about misspellings, uses of rhetoric, or uncommon sentences. She calls for the delocalized literary composition of Southeast Asian Chinese. She uses words to describe her dark and miserable life experience of being an immigrant in Taiwan. Her picture books take a small number of pages and simplified dialogue to tell a story, in a very concise and neat style and she paints with bright and bold colors to display the inner sight of the storyteller instead of the objective scene.

Achievements
Maniniwei has started winning awards since 2020. Her book Dahulu Parang Sekarang Besi: Pantun Melayu won the Book of the Year from OpenBook, and the 35th Golden Tripod Award in the literature category in 2021. Around the same year, the Taoyuan Chung Chao-cheng Literary Award also awarded the first prize to Maniniwei for her Country Girl (山河少女). Continuing in 2021, Maniniwei won Kaohsiung Municipal Takao Literature Award in the category of Chinese prose for When I Fall Asleep (我睡覺的時候).