About Me
Heidi is an award-winning Malaysian author for both children and adults
Heidi Shamsuddin is an award winning author of stories inspired by Southeast Asia for both children and adults. Her first short story Johan the Honey Hunter, won the regional prize for the Eye Level Children’s Literature Award in 2012. Since then, she has written and published novels, short stories, a historical middle-grade series, educational readers and picture books. In 2017, her screenplay for Batik Girl won the IPCC Award and was made into an award winning short animated film by R&D Studio and Tudidut Studio.
Her collection of Southeast Asian folk tales, Nusantara: A Sea of Tales (Penguin Random House SEA) has recently been selected for the IBBY Honour List 2024. As part of her ongoing undertaking to preserve and spread the folk stories of the region, she has become an authority on the subject and has been invited to speak at the Asian Festival of Children’s Content (2017), TEDx Universiti Malaya (2018), the MBBY International Conference on Children and Books (2021), the Georgetown Literary Festival (2021), the Singapore Writer’s Festival (2022) and the IBBY International Conference in Putrajaya in 2022. Her most recent novel, Zarra and the Twelve Realms of Kayangan has just been published by Penguin Random House SEA and is an adaptation of several Malaysian folk tales set in modern times.