About Us

At This Is Southeast Asia we publish first-person essays about places in Southeast Asia, written by young Southeast Asian writers.

Each essay on this site is about one place. A place can be as large as a megacity or as small as a wooden bench by a roadside. It can be a neighborhood, town or village; a university, restaurant or house of worship; a coffee shop, office, street or public park; a mountain, river, farm or forest.

We're especially interested in places where different people meet, where various elements of society come together.

Each writer, in their essay about a place, tells us what they see and what they hear, how they feel about the place, what it means to them, and what it suggests to them about the society in which they live.

We want to commission essays in writers' languages of choice rather than relying only on English-language submissions. Too little Southeast Asian writing currently gets translated into English. We aim to help change this.

Young writers are our focus: our contributors typically range from 16 to 40 years old. The perspective and priorities of Southeast Asian youth differ, in significant ways, from those of older generations in the region—and like young people elsewhere, their voices are going largely unheeded by those in positions of power.

We hope to offer young Southeast Asians a platform to have their voices heard internationally. We see a need for more people to see their worlds through their eyes.

We're committed to supporting young Southeast Asian writers as best we can: we pay all our contributors.

Our hope is to publish essays about places by young writers from all Southeast Asian nations: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Burma, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

This Is Southeast Asia is a venture of IP Communications Pty Ltd, a small publisher based in Melbourne, Australia, ABN 43 086 165 782. Editor and Publisher of This Is Southeast Asia is David Fettling.