Sketch by Daniel Alekow

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Writer-photographer, based in Berlin and Kuala Lumpur.
“works with a keen eye and a full heart”


The places 
that make me






You could say that I’ve always been in a state of motion. As a toddler I was already in possession of a passport, though it was a restricted one and allowed entry to only one country: neighbouring Singapore. I was weaned on countless interstate family road trips around Malaysia, plotting loops on the map through Perak, Kuala Lumpur, and Johor—and across the causeway to that little red dot, Singapore, where the other half my relatives live.

Later, I studied Law in England, and being abroad for that extended period emboldened me, later, to see more of the world for myself, unmediated by friends and family. After graduating, I went backpacking through Central America, and it was there that I realised I could be alone in an unfamiliar place without feeling lonely, speak Spanish without butchering it, and salsa without inflicting serious bodily harm on others. It’s hard to overstate how those months changed the idea of travel for me. It was the first experience of my life to draw out some of the contradictions I felt I was living, and continue to live, uncomfortably with, but it was also life-affirming and helped me to begin understanding the lives that existed outside myself and my general milieu. Travel was no longer about escapism, if it ever was, but a closer communion with the world, which, for me, always goes hand-in-hand with writing.

These days, you’ll usually find me in Berlin or Kuala Lumpur, and occasionally for short stints in London where many of my friends remain. Wherever possible (it’s harder as I get older), I try to set up ‘camp’ elsewhere for a season. Years back, looking for a possible way back to Latin America, I landed in Lima, Peru, and stayed for what ended up to be just six months (I had planned to stay longer). I haven’t been back to the region since but I continue to carry it with me, and the memories I collected there sometimes still slip, unbidden, into my present life.

Still, even as other countries and cities sometimes better express my desires, Malaysia remains my emotional anchor, even when I resist it, when I want to get away. You know that line from the movie Gone Baby Gone? Something about how it’s the things you don’t choose that make you who you are? My restlessness has never been about finding somewhere ‘better’ to be; I find something to love about every place I’ve been and grow nostalgic for it when I’ve left. I am ever curious about all the places I’ve never been, hoping that by going there, I’ll be able to better understand all the interconnections of our world.

But before I ever crossed physical distances, I wandered even further between the pages of books: The Call of the Wild, Moby Dick, The Secret Garden, Great Expectations, The Hound of the Baskervilles… and let’s not forget the Mandarin audio tapes of scary Chinese fairytales my mum bought me, which I would listen to at bedtime with the covers pulled over my head and my back pressed right up against the wall. How could a child who grew up on such vicarious adventures not turn into an adult with a deep, deep longing to be out in the world?








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