Marco Ferrarese: My words are an extension of my punk rock spirit

Marco Ferrarese, who made his debut as novelist at this year’s Singapore Writers Festival with Nazi Goreng (Monsoon Books), is a former international punk rock guitarist, and now a freelance travel and culture writer based in South East Asia.

According to his publishers, Nazi Goreng is an intense Malaysian coming-of-age novel that stands alongside the works of Irvine Welsh and Chuck Palahniuk.

Nazi Goreng is fast-paced, entertaining and a fascinating insight into the vernacular of the streets of Malaysia. It is “purely fictional, albeit based on real events that occurred in Malaysia in the past few years,” says Ferrarese. “I wanted to make people reflect about their condition, their racist views, and the shit stains at the crack of their own asses. I couldn’t just keep it all inside of me any longer.”

Kitaab interviewed the author a little while before the book launch.

From a rock guitarist to a travel writer and now a novelist based in Malaysia. How did that journey happen for you? Did you always want to be a novelist?

Well, it’s been a long journey that requires a long explanation: I started reading fantasy and horror fiction when I was pretty young. Lovecraft, Howard, King, Barker, Dick, Asimov etc. I was lucky as my mother believed books were  important tools for education, although she didn’t approve my penchant for the supernatural and the horror.  Yes, I knew I would have written fantastic books: my first attempts at writing are prehistory. I believe that a couple notebooks filled with my terribly undulating 10 years old handwriting still lay somewhere at my parents’ house in Italy. A pointless supernatural story, set in the USA, trying to clone Stephen King.