Description
About the Author

Winner of the National Art Award 2006

Wefada Marwan, an academic, is thrust into captaining her family’s shipping business. She must also face up to her nascent feelings for her much younger Algerian student, Elemine, which she initially tries to deny. However, as their romance blossoms, she starts remembering lessons from her grandparents’ marriage to navigate her own.

Fatimah, Wefada’s grandmother, too, fell in love with an Arab man—Ben Qortubi. He migrated to Malaysia, established their shipping business, and started a family with Fatimah. But tragedy struck during the Japanese invasion of Malaysia, silencing Wefada’s grandfather forever.

Will Wefada successfully navigate the choppy waters of looking out for her family and their business while finding love?

In The Prau with the Silent Soul, Faisal Tehrani explores transgressive love, intergenerational trauma, and most importantly, the Malayan people’s unbreakable bond with their sea, which can be a nightmare and a source of love and sustenance. This is a story that has emerged from the sea and that returns to it.
Faisal Tehrani (aka Mohd Faizal Musa) is a Malaysian author. He is deemed as a controversial author, as over seven of his works have been banned by Malaysian government. In 2017, The Jakarta Post named him Malaysia’s rebel author. Among his best remembered works are 1515, The Professor, and The Koro Riots.

The Prau with the Silent Soul is one of Tehrani’s celebrated works. First published in 2007, it has received the best novel award in the Special Writing Competition Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Malaysia’s Institute of Language and Literature. In 2024, Tehrani’s screenplay for Maryam Pagi Ke Malam won the Best Original Film at 21st Asian Film Festival in Rome, Italy.

Zawiyah Baba was the former advisor of the Librarians’ Association of Malaysia. She began her career as research librarian at the Ministry of Information Malaysia before moving to the National Library of Malaysia, from where she retired as director-general. Post-retirement, she was appointed principal research fellow at the Institute of the Malay World & Civilization (ATMA), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.

She has prolifically translated books and journal articles from and to Malay and English. She passed away in May 2023.

Authors

The Prau With the Silent Soul