Bettina Chua Abdullah is a writer, director of a creative space and self-confessed restless soul. Her publications include long-form captions for the dronescape photography volume Over Penang, which won the Malaysian National Library’s Award for Book of the Year. Telltale Food, the first anthology from the Fay Khoo Award for Food+Drink Writing that she founded in 2017, offers the genre’s writers one of the few platforms for their work in the Southeast Asian region. She dons two hats in her latest book, To Nourish with Love, an Indian food memoir which she both wrote and styled.

Bettina’s professional life in television started as an on-screen talent at the age of five to becoming Malaysia’s first international business news presenter at CNBC Asia in Singapore. As chief anchor of the signature morning show Squawk Box, she helmed a team that drew a daily audience of 25 million viewers throughout Asia. Twice the winner of the coveted Presenter of the Year title at the Asian Television Awards, she also independently created a self-financed, self-produced television series called Asian Style, the region’s first look at the art, architecture, food, fashion and travel destinations of a rising Asian lifestyle culture. 

A sabbatical from television took her to Bali, where she honed her creative skills in lifestyle, product design and hospitality. Four years later she was back in Kuala Lumpur as executive director of property developers BRDB, which she describes as ‘an invaluable learning experience, and the best crash course in management anyone could have’. Here she worked with tenants to create concepts for retail and F&B spaces, including a game-changing gourmet food hall. At the same time, she commenced a self-directed study of Islamic art and architecture, and founded the Free Tree Society, a social enterprise which educates the community on the importance of trees by giving out free seedlings and care manuals to the urban public. 

The rich variety of her life experiences proved to be a great foundation for the generation of creative concepts, content development and experience engineering. This led to the establishment of Hikayat, Penang’s nexus of the arts, literature, film and culture in 2018. In 2023, she heads to Sicily to write the first of a series of travelogues exploring islands that sit at the crosscurrents of history, culture and time. 

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Bettina Chua Abdullah