
Showing posts with label literary festivals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literary festivals. Show all posts
Friday, 6 September 2019
Looking ahead: Singapore Writers Festival 2019

Friday, 9 November 2018
Circumstance / A Yellow House
Circumstance is launching alongside A Yellow House by Karien Van Ditzhuijzen.
Details: Sunday 11 Nov, 3.30 pm, the Arts House. See you here, I hope!!
Tuesday, 30 October 2018
Elaine Chiew Talks to Ng Yi-Sheng, author of Lion City
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Photo Courtesy: Epigram Books |
His books include the poetry collections last boy (winner of the Singapore Literature Prize 2008), Loud Poems for a Very Obliging Audience, and A Book of Hims; the movie novelisation Eating Air and the non-fiction work SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century. Additionally, he translated Wong Yoon Wah’s Chinese poetry collection The New Village and he has co-edited publications such as GASPP: A Gay Anthology of Singapore Poetry and Prose, Eastern Heathens: An Anthology of Subverted Asian Folklore and SingPoWriMo 2018.
He has also been active in the professional theatre since the age of 17, collaborating with companies such as TheatreWorks, W!ld Rice, Toy Factory and Musical Theatre Ltd to create plays like Hungry, 251, Georgette, The Last Temptation of Stamford Raffles and Reservoir. He is a founding member of the spoken word troupe the Party Action People and co-organised the annual queer literary reading ContraDiction for twelve years.
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Photo Courtesy: Epigram Books |
EC: Welcome
to AsianBooksBlog, Yi-Sheng. A real honour to have you.
First,
congratulations on the publication of Lion
City (Epigram Books), which will be launched at the Singapore Writers’Festival 2018. It’s a fantastic read, full of mordant humour, allegorical
fabulism, political heft, and a willingness to say the unsayable.
NYS: Thanks so much! I’m so pleased you
liked it.
EC: Praise
for the book, notably Sharlene Teo, likens your stories and voice to Etgar
Keret. Also Neil Gaiman. Are they influences?
NYS: Neil Gaiman’s been a massive influence on me:
as a teenager in the 90s I read the Sandman
and Books of Magic comics while
they were coming out, and had my mind utterly blown by the idea of this
globally (and cosmically) unified mythology and by the idea that magic’s just
lurking at the edges of the contemporary urban world. Neverwhere, Marvel 1602,
Smoke and Mirrors and The Graveyard
Book have been great favourites too.
I’m afraid
I’ve never read Etgar Keret, but I must: Lavie Tidhar also said I sounded like
him.
Wednesday, 17 October 2018
On translation, by Nicky Harman
Nicky Harman, Yan Ge, Natascha Bruce
Let’s talk literary translation, or how to keep audiences riveted
by swearing at them
Last week, I was at Cheltenham Literary Festival, appearing on a panel with Yan Ge and Natascha Bruce. We had carte blanche to talk about Translating China, but decided to focus on Yan Ge’s new novel, The Chilli BeanPaste Clan (Chinese: 《我们家》) because (let’s be honest) it helps sales, and because the three of us all had plenty to say about the book.
Last week, I was at Cheltenham Literary Festival, appearing on a panel with Yan Ge and Natascha Bruce. We had carte blanche to talk about Translating China, but decided to focus on Yan Ge’s new novel, The Chilli BeanPaste Clan (Chinese: 《我们家》) because (let’s be honest) it helps sales, and because the three of us all had plenty to say about the book.
The Chilli
Bean Paste Clan is set in a fictional town in West China
and is the story of the Duan-Xue family, owners of the town’s lucrative chilli
bean paste factory, their formidable matriarch, and her badly-behaved, middle-aged
son. As the old lady’s eightieth birthday approaches, her children get together
to make preparations. Tensions that have simmered for many
years come to the surface, family secrets are revealed and long-time sibling
rivalries flare up with renewed vigour.
Wednesday, 4 April 2018
Interview with Singapore Unbound Founder Jee Leong Koh
This is Lucía Orellana Damacela first
column as International Correspondent for Asian Books Blog. Interview with
New York-based Singapore Unbound founder and organizer Jee Leong Koh.
How was SG Unbound born, when, who created it?

How was SG Unbound born, when, who created it?
It all began when writer and
arts administrator Paul Rozario-Falcone and I got together one wintry afternoon
in Cornelia Street Café, in New York City, to discuss the possibility of organizing
a Singapore literature showcase in our adopted home. The literary scene in
Singapore was growing, with new writers, presses, and publications, and we
thought it was time to introduce the Big Apple to the Little Red Dot.
To rally support from the
creative community in NYC, we started the Second Saturdays Reading Series, a
monthly gathering featuring an open mike and a published author, and hosted in
different private homes around the city. The first Second Saturdays gathering
was held in Paul and Al’s home in Carroll Gardens in February 2014.
With the support of this
community, we mounted the first Singapore Literature Festival in NYC in October
that year, showcasing 14 Singaporean writers. The festival was so warmly
received that I
was encouraged to make it a biennial event. At the 2nd
Festival in September 2016, Singapore
Unbound was officially launched.
Wednesday, 21 March 2018
Off to The Script Road, the Macau litfest
Yao Feng in conversation with Han Dong, March 2018
The Script Road in Macau has always had a reputation for being a good place to get invited to – a serious litfest and, most of all, a lot of fun. And so it proved. The first few days focussed on writers such as Ana Margarida de Carvalho (Portugal), Rosa Montero (Spain), Li-Young Lee from the US, Chan Ho-Kei from Hong Kong, and writer and translator, Jeremy Tiang, and children’s author Bao Dongni, Han Dong, Yu Jian and Yin Lichuan from China. The last three, who largely made their name as poets, also direct films, so while I was there we saw Han Dong’s One Night at the Wharf and Yu Jian’s Jade Green Station.
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