Winner, Reader's Choice Awards, Non-Fiction Category for Growing Up With Ghosts 2012 Winner of Samsung's Ultra Honour Award 2006 Neu Woman Achievers Award 2005 Bernice Chauly[1] (born 1968, Georgetown, Penang) is a Malaysian writer,[2][3][4] poet,[5][6] educator, festival director, actor, photographer and filmmaker.

[7] Born to a Chindian teacher couple, she read Education and English Literature at the University of Winnipeg, Canada as a government scholar.

[citation needed] She is the author of seven books, which include poetry and prose; going there and coming back (1997), The Book of Sins (2008), Lost in KL (2008), the acclaimed memoir Growing Up With Ghosts (2011) which won in the Popular Readers’ Choice Awards 2012 in the Non-Fiction Category, Onkalo (2013),[8][9] her third collection of poems which Nobel laureate J.M Coetzee has said is "direct, honest and powerful", Once We Were There (2017) published by Epigram Books,[10][11] Incantations/Incarcerations (2019) published by Gerakbudaya.

The award judges stated that "the GTLF stands outs a vibrant, diverse and brave festival that engages with a wide community of voices, speaking to the world from a complex region."

[15] She was a resident at the University of Iowa's International Writing Program in 2014[16][17][18][19] and is the Founder and Director of the KL Writers Workshop.