By Yong Shu Hoong

Instead of pondering to death the question "Is satire dead?", it seems that Australian writer Julie Koh would rather think about how to carry on this great art of taking jibes at everything under the sun – with a dash of surrealism tossed in.

"The moment one stops crying and begins to laugh that hard, dark laugh is the moment a satirist is truly born," she writes in 'Satirist Rising', a short story that satirises satirical writing, from her collection, Portable Curiosities (University of Queensland Press, 2016). Incidentally, this book has received praise from reviewers and been shortlisted for the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction and the Queensland Literary Awards' Steele Rudd Award.

After studying politics and law at the University of Sydney, Koh worked in corporate law before giving up her career to pursue writing. Her short stories have appeared in anthologies like The Best Australian Stories (2014, 2015 and 2016) and Best Australian Comedy Writing (2016).

In 2016, she published another short-story collection, Capital Misfits, and edited BooksActually's Gold Standard 2016, touted as a "new annual anthology from indie bookstore BooksActually, comprising short fiction by the best cult writers of East Asia, Southeast Asia and the diaspora." Both titles were put out by Math Paper Press in Singapore.

1. What are you reading right now?
I've been travelling, so I could only bring a handful of books with me, including The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley, The Assassination Complex by Jeremy Scahill and Drone Theory by Grégoire Chamayou. Like many readers, I've got The Sellout and The Sympathizer lined up. I'm also dipping in and out of George Saunders' Tenth of December. Along the way, friends have given me books they know I'll love: Slaughterhouse-Five, which I'm really enjoying, and The Yellow Peril: A Squint at Some Australian Attitudes towards Orientals.

2. If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play, or poem, who would you be, and why?
It would be fun to be a modern-day Orlando – fluid and everywhere. I'd also like to be Roald Dahl's Matilda – moving chalk around; messing with people's heads.

3. What is the greatest misconception about you?
That I write full-time.

4. Name one living author and one dead author you identify with most, and tell us why.
I take my cue from Jonathan Swift when it comes to satire. Tom Cho's work has strongly influenced mine. His short-story collection, Look Who's Morphing, showed me how to write about identity while breaking boundaries.

5. Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
I had writer's block for years and did the programme in The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity (by Julia Cameron) to overcome it.

6. What qualities do you admire most in a writer?
I like being around writers who are kind to the people they meet.

7. What is one trait you deplore most in writing or writers?
Arrogance.

8. Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
Eric Yoshiaki Dando gave me some advice he himself received while studying writing: "To be a writer, all you need to do is stand on a desk and declare that you are one."

9. Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I...
…took up the saxophone because my flute wasn't loud enough.

10. At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy, or an action thriller to watch, which will you go for, and why?
I'd pick a rom-com or action thriller. Rom-coms help me generate new ideas. The entire plot for the tragedy I'm writing came to me after watching The Proposal. Action movies make me a better driver for the half-hour after I see them – fast turns through the car park, that sort of thing.

11. What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
I don't have a favourite right now. My least favourite is "vagina". It could have sounded more pleasant.

12. Write a short-short story in three lines that include the following three words: "parliament", "house" and "music".

Outside my window, a parliament of owls is playing terrible house music.

"Can it," I say, "or you'll be the next remix."

Swivelling their heads to the beat, they don't give a hoot.

13. What object is indispensable to you when you write?
I have chronic typing injuries, so use a Kinesis Advantage keyboard. It's loud and expensive, and it helps.

14. What is the best time of the day for writing?
For idea generation, just before bed. For cleaning up the mess, morning.

15. If you had a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
I'd get three X-Men to pull me out of that last supper.

16. As an Asian-Australian writer, what challenges did you face incorporating satire into your stories in Portable Curiosities (and will this penchant for satire continue in the debut novel you're working on)?
It's strange in Australia to write literary satire at all, let alone be an Asian-Australian writer of satire. It wasn't a challenge incorporating it into my fiction – the challenge lay in finding an audience for it. Was anyone going to publish my work? (Answer: eventually, yes.) Were people going to feel uncomfortable reading satire about mainstream Australia written by "the Other"? (Answer: I think so.)

Some readers have struggled to overcome their assumption that fiction must make them deeply emotional and can't just be an intellectual exercise. They assume that fiction with a political message is unsophisticated. I can't help them.

The novel I'm working on is probably satire on a grander scale.

17. What would you write on your own tombstone?
Generally lazy, she didn't bother waking up.

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