"Love books well, and they will love you well," is Carol’s favourite verse from her collection of poetry. The World is A Dark and Lovely Place was self-published by Carol Chu Mei Yin and is her debut work. The title was released on 16 September 2019, in the Malaysian city of Kuala Lumpur.

“It took me quite a long time to write my poetry book. I started writing ever since I was 19. This book is practically my life's work. I almost thought that I would never get it published.”

Carol, 37, is a high school English teacher in a government school in Johor, a southern state in Malaysia which lies nearby to the island country of Singapore. Her passions include writing poetry and reading: “Sometimes I feel like I'm supposed to be a full-time author or a reader at a publishing company; but life just turned out differently for me.”

Carol says that it is difficult to be a full-time writer as she needs to earn her living. She also added that “Teaching is a rewarding job, I love my students so much and teaching has already become second nature to me.”

Carol hopes that her individualistic style of poetry writing in The World is a Dark and Lovely Place is one day recognized as widely as other contemporary poets such as Lang Leav and Rupi Kaur. However, she says: “My writing is neither traditional-style classical poetry, nor modern insta-poetry but rather traditional and modern.” She says that she really does not know how to describe her writing and in order to truly understand, it is better to have read her book oneself.

On being asked the reason behind her writing The World Is A Dark and Lovely Place in the English language and not in Malay, she says: “I love the English language. Somehow, it actually is my first language that I use to speak when I was young and I'm good at this language.”

Carol has had 12 years of experience teaching English and believes that since English is an international language, it will be possible for her book to reach a much wider audience of readers. For further works too, she says that she has no plans in writing any books in Malay yet but is instead planning to write her second book of poetry in English.

She hopes to make more of an impact in the international poetry scene with her work but is afraid at her pace of writing: “At the rate I'm writing, I'm not even sure it'll be published soon.” Her life goal, however, is to one day write a YA novel or a memoir. “Hopefully I will get to achieve that before it's too late,” she says.

Some of Carol’s favourite poets include Shelley, Wordsworth, Dickinson and Frost. Beyond reading, some of her hobbies are crocheting, playing the piano and travelling. Pen-palling is also another one of her hobbies and she says that in the normal “good old days before the COVID-19 pandemic” she would sometimes take a 30-minute drive (by Grab) to Customs and Immigration in Johor Bahru to cross over to Singapore by train for a day trip or two to meet with her Singaporean pen-pal, Joanna.

The physical copy of Carol’s The World Is A Dark and Lovely Place is underway to soon be available internationally. Currently, her poetry book can be found in Malaysia at Kinokuniya, Popular or MPH. The eBook is available internationally at Scribd, Kobo and Amazon Kindle.

To her readers and those aspiring to write, she advises: “Don't give up on your dreams. For those looking towards publishing a book, I suggest you to keep on writing and polishing your draft. Never give up. I believe there is a book inside each of us but we need to put in effort to write it out.”