Malachi Edwin Vethamani

His stories have been published in Queer Southeast Asia Literary Journal (2020), Creative Flight Literary Journal (2020), Business Mirror (2018), and Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts (2017).

Vethamani edited a volume of Malaysian poems entitled Malchin Testament: Malaysian Poems (Maya Press, Kuala Lumpur: 2017) which spans a period of 60 years, deemed to be "the most important collection of verse published thus far in this new millennium in Malaysia", since there has not been another comprehensive compilation of Malaysian verse after Lloyd Fernando's anthology The Second Tongue (1976). Malchin Testament was praised for taking this into account and including all the important poets who wrote before the 1990s, deemed as "the true predecessors of today's Malaysian poetry, such as Ee Tiang Hong, Wong Phui Nam, Siew-Yue Killingley, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Muhammad Haji Salleh, Hilary Tham and Salleh Ben Joned".

Until 2016, Vethamani was better known in academic circles as a critic and bibliographer, as well as an internationally recognised teacher trainer and expert on Malaysian literature in English. Although now seen as a prolific writer of short stories and poems, he admitted that "for many years, I did not have the confidence in seeing my creative work published".

He published A Bibliography of Malaysian Literature in English (Maya Press, Kuala Lumpur) in 2015. Vethamani acknowledged Professor Lloyd Fernando as a mentor, role model and friend, and much of his early research on the bibliography of Malaysian literature was done thanks to the access to the professor's personal library at home.

He received his early education in Kuala Lumpur at Methodist Boys' Primary School and continued at Methodist Boys' Secondary School. He completed his Higher School Certificate at Vanto Academy in Petaling Jaya. His studies at the University of Malaya saw him obtain a Bachelor of Arts (Hons.) in English Literature, a Diploma in Education (TESL), and a Master of Education in Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL). In 1993, he secured a Chevening Scholarship and completed his doctorate in literature in English from the University of Nottingham, UK.

During the 1990s, Vethamani's poetry explored the themes of relationships and mixed marriages. In 2003, he edited a volume of poems for young adults entitled In-Sights: Malaysian Poems (Maya Press, Kuala Lumpur). He has published two volumes of poems, Life Happens (Maya Press, 2017) and Complicated Lives (Maya Press, 2016). His poems have been described as "very intimate and confessional".

The entry into his teaching career in 1979 was accidental when he took a chance to apply for a teaching vacancy in MARA Junior Science College (MRSM) Pengkalan Chepa as an English teacher and discovered that he loved it. After a 26-year career as a lecturer at Universiti Putra Malaysia, he went on to be the founding dean of Wawasan Open University School of Education, Languages and Communication and Taylor's University School of Education in 2009 and 2011, respectively. He was conferred the title Emeritus Professor by University of Nottingham upon his retirement in January 2021.

The collection includes all the early practitioners of verse starting from around the birth of Malaysia in 1963, although Wong Phui Nam early poems were already written in the decade prior to that. The “Malchin Testament” of the title of the anthology was a hat-tip to a poem of the same name by poet Salleh Ben Joned, which poked fun at the possibilities of Malaysian English slang and idiom being used in the writing of local poems and "democratising the language altogether". Newer, emerging voices were also fairly represented although the reviewer lamented the absence of Nicholas Wong (or Zhou Sivan) in the anthology.

Vethamani edited Ronggeng-Ronggeng, an anthology of 28 short stories written between 1959 and 2018. The collection offers a breadth of stories; from the newness of an independent and multicultural nation to stories which express "smaller, more intimate realities". It comprises a variety of genres, from social politics, social realism, to horror, and the supernatural. A common thread running through the collection is the theme of belonging, "whether in terms of nation, family or society". The contributing authors were diverse in terms of the period as well as ethnicity and background, with selections from Zen Cho, Kassim Ahmad, K.S Maniam and Awang Kedua, amongst others.

Malachi Edwin Vethamani (b. 8 July 1955) was born in Brickfields, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He has two sons, Vincent Jeremiah Edwin and Julian Matthew Edwin.