FCC club lunch with Jake VAN DER KAMP

Speaker: Jake VAN DER KAMP
Columnist / Author
Topic: The Twelfth Fairy

FCC treasurer Jake VAN DER KAMP, having walked away last year from his daily financial column in the South China Morning Post, is still regularly perched behind his laptop in the northeast corner of the main bar and still writing fiction, but avowedly so now. The product of his labours over the last year is a novel, The Twelfth Fairy, which is now being published by Chameleon Press. The book is a retelling of a classic fairy tale but with a twist to pose an old question: How do you know what you think you know?

Jake takes the side of the maligned Twelfth Fairy, who put Sleeping Beauty under an enchantment, and offers a fair hearing for her plea that it never really happened, that there are really no such things as fairies or fairy gifts, that they are all just the fantasies of an organised religion. It is a philosophical theme with echoes for journalists who must find their way on a daily basis around public relations blandishments: What’s the real story when we push the fairy tale aside?