Lion City Lit: Swag

Asian Books Blog is based in Singapore. Lion City Lit explores what’s going on in the City-State, lit-wise. Here Jo Furniss introduces Swag, the new online literary magazine she's launching. Its events calendar,  which brings all relevant listings together in one convenient place, is already live, and is packed with ideas. From January, the quarterly journal will feature author interviews and new writing.

So: over to Jo…

Lion City Lit: New Books From Ethos

Asian Books Blog is based in Singapore. Lion City Lit explores what’s going on in the City-State, lit-wise. Local publisher Ethos Books has recently launched a slew of new books, and will be launching several more at the upcoming Singapore Writers Festival, SGWF, which will run Oct 30 - Nov 8.  Click on the highlighted link to explore  a selection of what Ethos is offering...

Lion City Lit: We Rose Up Slowly by Jon Gresham

Asian Books Blog is based in Singapore. Lion City Lit explores what’s going on in the City-State, lit-wise. Here Jon Gresham talks about We Rose Up Slowly, his debut collection of short stories, published by Math Paper Press, a local publishing house dedicated to promoting poetry and literary fiction. It is run by the same people who run BooksActually, an independent book shop which is well-known in Singapore.

Lion City Lit: Exploring South Asian Identity, by Verena Tay

Asian Books Blog is based in Singapore. Lion City Lit explores what’s going on in the City-State, lit-wise. Here, Verena Tay talks about the South Asia Literary Salon, organised by the Institute of South Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. It was chaired by Meira Chand and took place earlier this month.

Lion City Lit: Edmund Wee, Epigram Books

Asian Books Blog is based in Singapore. Lion City Lit explores what’s going on in the City-State, lit-wise.  This month, I meet Edmund Wee, the founder, publisher, and CEO of Epigram Books, one of Singapore’s largest general trade publishing houses.

Lion City Lit: Three From Ethos

Asian Books Blog is based in Singapore.  Lion City Lit explores literary life in our own backyard. This week, we highlight three new titles from local publisher, Ethos.

Moth Stories, a collection of short stories by Leonora Liow

A young girl’s ambitions prompt dark stirrings in her nature. A father reckons with a lifetime of dysfunctional family relations. A foreign worker is cut adrift on a raft of shattered dreams. In the title story, Moth, a condemned woman reclaims her broken dignity. In a collection filled with pity, humour and irony, Leonora Liow explores the private universes of individuals navigating the arcane waters of human existence and illuminates the extraordinary humanity that endures.

Leonora Liow is a Singapore-based writer. Moth Stories is her debut collection.

Moth Stories is published in paperback, priced at SGD 20, excluding tax.

Lion City Lit: Singapore Mutiny

Asian Books Blog is based in Singapore.  Lion City Lit explores literary life in our own backyard. This week, we offer a quick notice for Singapore Mutiny, a stirring account of combat and survival, by Mary Brown and Edwin A. Brown. This is a must-read for all history buffs, but especially for those with an interest in military history, or in the history of India, or in that of South East Asia.  

The Singapore Sepoy Mutiny of 1915 was an alarming episode in Singapore’s colonial history that saw 850 Indian soldiers serving in the British army revolt and slaughter 47 Brits, both soldiers and civilians. To mark the Mutiny's centenary Monsoon Books has brought out a diary kept at the time by the Browns, a colonial couple who were in the thick of the action.  The diary, never previously published, has forewords by Professor Brian P. Farrell, Department of History, National University of Singapore, Nigel Barley, the author and anthropologist, and Celia Ferguson, the Browns’ granddaughter.

Here’s an extract from the diary’s opening entry:

Chinese New Year 1915 will long be remembered in the Straits Settlements…We left for home, had a tiffin, and went to our rooms for a lie-off, having arranged to go for a good walk when the heat of the day was over. We had our tea, and at 5 pm got into the trap. We drove along Tanglin Road, into Stephens Road, and along Bukit Timah Road to the junction of Cluny Road, and there we dismissed the syce. We thought it a curious fact that no-one was playing tennis…and there was not a soul to be seen on the garrison golf course…You can imagine our horror when we found that the 5th Light Infantry had broken out in open mutiny and had been in Tanglin that afternoon, and were even then supposed to be marching on Singapore!

Also by Edwin A. Brown, Indiscreet Memories: 1901 Singapore through the eyes of a colonial Englishman. 

Both books are published in paperback, priced in local currencies, and widely available in Asia. Ebooks are available from online retailers. 

Lion City Lit: Woolf Works

Asian Books Blog is based in Singapore.  Lion City Lit explores literary life in our own backyard.  This week Raelee Chapman visits Woolf Works, a coworking space dedicated to women, and named after Virginia Woolf, who famously declared, in her extended essay A Room of One's Own, that women must have a space of their own to produce art. 

Where does a woman go to write if she cannot write at home? There are myriad reasons why writing at home can be complicated, and full of distractions. So I was curious when a writer friend of mine told me about Woolf Works, and I went along to an open day - a chance for women to bring their moleskin notebooks and laptops and explore the space.

Lion City Lit: Audrey Chin

Asian Books Blog is based in Singapore.  Lion City Lit explores literary life in our own backyard.  This week Singaporean author Audrey Chin is in conversation with Raelee Chapman.

As both a child of migrant Chinese and settled Peranakan parents, and also as a daughter-in-law of the Vietnamese diaspora, Audrey sees herself as an in-between person, a traveller through different cultures. She writes what she knows, telling stories about the search for belonging, about South East Asia, about her mixed cultural inheritance, and about the Westerners who colonised her region. Her most recent novel, As the Heart Bones Break, spans 60 years, and follows an Orange County Viet-Cong spy's quest to find peace and a home for his conflicted heart. It was shortlisted for the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize for English language fiction

What was your inspiration for As The Heart Bones Break? How much research was required for the novel and how long did it take to write?

I married into the Vietnamese diaspora over 30 years ago. In part, As The Heart Bones Break was written to address the fence of silence which my Vietnamese family and friends erected around their memories; I wanted to leave my children with a story of this history. But it was also written as a response to the dearth of Vietnam War fiction from the point of view of male Vietnamese participants, especially the majority who had loyalty to neither North nor South but merely wanted the war to be over.

Lion City Lit: Q & A with R Ramachandran

Following on from the success of Singapore Writers Festival, we realised here at Asian Books Blog that we ought to give greater coverage to what's going on in our own backyard. The result is Lion City Lit, our new Singapore slot.  Here, Rosie Milne talks to R Ramachandran, executive director, National Book Development Council of Singapore.

Singapore aims to position itself as a centre for publishing of Asian content - it wants any writer with content relating to Asia to think of it as the place to publish. It helps that the country has four official languages: English; Chinese; Malay; Tamil. The vibrant local publishing scene is unusual in that it has houses specialising in each language. As part of its strategy to win pre-eminence in the region, the National Book Development Council makes a number of awards through the Singapore Literature Prize, which has categories in each language sector.  The 2014 awards were announced last week. I asked  Mr. Ramachandran about the tiny City-State’s big ambitions.

How does the Singapore Literature Prize contribute to raising Singapore's profile as a centre of publishing? 

Books can be eligible even if they are not published in Singapore, and the award system is geared to grow both to include books published throughout Asia, and also to include a larger number of categories and languages than at present.

Other than administering the Singapore Literature Prize, what else is the National Book Development Council doing to promote publishing in Singapore?

In order to serve as an effective centre of Asian content, we need to develop our translation resources so that Asian content in other languages can be translated into English and published in Singapore. Such translated works could be more easily marketed in the region and beyond than could books in Asian languages.  We are planning to set up a translation centre to facilitate translation of literary works into different languages.  We have also upgraded our established training body, the Academy of Literary Arts and Publishing, to develop the skills of those in the local publishing industry. 

Doesn’t the City-State’s small size and small books market limit its ambitions?

No. We publish for the world. For instance, each year we organise the Asian Festival of Children’s Content. This brings together content creators and producers, publishers, teachers, librarians and anyone interested in quality Asian content for children. The Festival carries the slogan: Asian Content for the World’s Children.  But it’s not just children’s publishing, we want all our local publishers to publish beyond the region to the world market, as do publishing houses in the US and the UK.

Have you learned from other small countries, which have had a big literary impact?  I'm thinking of Ireland.

We have not only studied Ireland, but also Israel and New Zealand, countries whose writers and creative people have made an impact on the rest of the world. The great advantage these countries have over us is a longer tradition of literature and a culture of publishing. Singapore is a migrant state, and a relatively new one, and even though our fathers and forefathers came from nations with rich cultural traditions – China, India, the Malay world - they migrated for materially better lives. Singapore’s early years were essentially spent on day-to-day matters and economic concerns were predominant. Since independence, after 50 years of post-colonial development, cultural interests have come to the fore. The growth of libraries, museums, art galleries, performing art centres, and a host of other services have emphasised the importance of the arts.

Okay, but are Singapore’s publishing ambitions driven by commerce, or culture?

Singapore has always been a commercial city and it will continue to be. But great commercial cities also emerge as centres of culture. Take London and New York in the present day, and Alexandria and Venice in earlier times. All are great examples of cities that are or were centres of the arts made possible by their commercial wealth. While commerce and banking are the foundations of wealth in Singapore, it has also realised the important part culture plays in people’s lives and is committed to nurture Singapore as a global city of the arts. The government has spent billions developing arts infrastructure, for example setting up the National Arts Council, the Media Development Authority, the School of the Arts, LaSalle College of the Arts, and the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, to train, nurture and support creative talent.

An international publishing industry needs an international rights marketplace. Are there any plans for Singapore to develop a books fair and rights market?  

Yes, the Singapore Book Publishers Association is planning to set up such a fair. The Book Council hopes to be involved in this effort. Meanwhile, the Book Council has developed a marketplace for children’s contents called Media Mart as part of the Asian Festival of Children’s Content. We want Media Mart to become known as the foremost regional rights fair for children’s content.