Singaporean

17A Keong Saik Road recounts Charmaine Leung’s growing-up years on Keong Saik Road in the 1970s when it was a prominent red-light precinct in Chinatown in Singapore. An interweaving of past and present narratives, 17A Keong Saik Road tells of her mother’s journey as a young child put up for sale to becoming the madame of a brothel in Keong Saik. Unfolding her story as the daughter of a brothel operator and witnessing these changes to her family, Charmaine traces the transformation of the Keon...

Early thirteenth century CE. The Srivijaya Empire, considered to be one of the world's greatest maritime forces, has been abruptly left powerless in a swift political exchange. With nothing but a meaningless crown, a once-lauded navy and the will to keep alive the name of Srivijaya against the endless onslaughts of old enemies and ambitious neighbours, Emperor Prabhu Dharmasena and his kin leave behind their island realm to traverse the seas, desperate and homeless. Among those who sail with ...

Translated by Zakaria Ali and Muhammad Herwanto Johari Mohamed Latiff Mohamed’s poems are not written to be pretty: there is blood, pus, rape, slime, and death. How else can they be, if they are songs for the destitute, hums of the hungry, and tears of the wretched who have lost everything? And who else are they for, but the New Malays, who are cursed to inherit what has been lost. These are the heroes whose stories have faded, who may yet rise again under tomorrow’s moon. This book brings to...

This collection contains the latest works from Cultural Medallion recipient Prof Edwin Thumboo. Of note are the poems based on biblical characters, something very close to his heart in recent years. Some evergreen works are included, such as “A poet reading”, and the sections are thematically named—Chin (for his wife), Tribes, Togetherness, Cultures, I to i, By Quiet Waters and Words. A must-have for any fan of poetry, this most collectable set of his published works makes the perfect additio...

Unapologetic, unafraid and unyielding, Alfian’s second collection of verse delves in greater depth the concerns in his first volume and moves into reclaiming our collective history and memory. In mining our psyche, he casts light where whispers and shadows lurk. He draws inspiration from censored histories, subsumed myths and invokes imagined voices from the exiled, demanding of the reader to witness the ubiquitous ideological fictions that surround us. This is one of the most dissonant and p...

Few nations if any, have ever held two national elections in a span of four months. Fewer still are key players who took part in both. This book is the story of extraordinary men and women who fought Singapore's 2011 General Election in May and the Presidential Election in August. Together with their loyal and dedicated supporters, they displayed great courage and conviction, and in so doing changed the political landscape forever. The writers of this book represent a broad spectrum of Singap...

This is a personal and philosophical account of schizophrenia that aims to raise awareness of mental health issues. The personal aspect of the book reveals the gritty reality of what it is like to have schizophrenia, and explores issues faced by those with mental illness, such as secrecy and recovery. The philosophical aspect of the book raises questions concerning the nature of mental illness, such as whether or not mental illness is ultimately physical or mental. Referencing contemporary de...

Police sergeant Hafiz lies in a coma after a gunshot to the head. The investigation by Internal Affairs uncovered a game of Russian roulette gone wrong, and the case is now closed. But there are rumbles of concern in the Ministry, and middle-aged civil servant Boon Teck—assisted by young colleague Nithya—is dispatched to take another look. Suffused with mystery and intrigue, After the Inquiry steps into the mirror maze of Singapore’s bureaucracy, where silvered surfaces hide troubling secrets...

Air-Conditioned Nation Revisited is an anthology of essays on Singapore politics by Cherian George. It draws upon his influential collection Singapore: The Air-Conditioned Nation (2000), on the country's politics of comfort and control, and from Singapore, Incomplete (2017), on its underdeveloped democracy. Updated for the impending transition to a new generation of leaders, this 20th anniversary edition of Air-Conditioned Nation offers critical reflections on continuity and change in Singapo...

Singapore lawyer Teo Soh Lung has written this careful account of her experiences and feelings when detained in Whitley Detention Centre from 21 May 1987 to 6 September 1987, and from April 1988 to 1 June 1990. Accused of involvement in the alleged “Marxist Conspiracy”, Soh Lung discusses many legal aspects of the case, including Singapore’s banning of London QC Anthony Lester and her various Appeal attempts. She tells of the regime and her physical and emotional suffering, as well as the str...

This collection of four plays by Alfian Sa’at explores the themes that have become a hallmark of the playwright’s work: national identity, racial relations, and the resistance of individuals against authoritarian systems. In The Optic Trilogy, the surfacing of buried secrets and repressed memories profoundly alters the way a man and woman see each other. In Fugitives, the members of a family discover that their self-definition relies on their interactions with ‘outsiders’ who exist beyond the...

Alfian Sa’at explores the Malay identity and racial relations in this third volume of the Collected Plays series. This volume collects plays written and staged in Malay, and translated to English for the very first time. In Nadirah, a young woman is shocked to find out her mother wants to marry a non-Muslim. In Parah, a group of students can no longer ignore the stereotypes and prejudices that divide the races, and the strain it puts on their friendship. In Geng Rebut Cabinet (GRC), we’re tra...

Alfian Sa’at’s The Asian Boys Trilogy is a fascinating, insightful tour through the lives and loves of the gay community in Singapore. In the campy and carnivalesque Dreamplay, history is turned upside-down as a goddess travels through time to ‘save gay men from themselves’. In Landmarks, geography takes centrestage, as eight short plays explore the spaces that have been claimed, colonised, and trespassed by those at the margins of the mainstream. In Happy Endings, the playwright’s adaptation...

With crayons and stained paper, artist Ho Chee Lick wanders around neighbourhoods in Singapore observing, perceiving, looking for that “something”: quiet and unremarkable objects and scenes of basic everyday life. One day some of his drawings came into the hands of poet Anne Lee Tzu Pheng who rediscovers the quiet beauty of these captured moments and explores their story with her words. Common Life is a visual and poetic journey into territories the mind often finds too familiar to excite fee...

In the electrifying months leading up to the watershed 2011 General Elections and in the tumultuous months after, playwright Alfian Sa’at interviewed Singaporeans to discover their responses to the elections. Covering a wide social and political spectrum, the candid interviews capture the GE experience through the voices of individual Singaporeans — from election candidates to pro-establishment civil servants; from taxi-drivers to teachers; from diehard opposition supporters to young people c...

Cordelia, Grace Chia’s second poetry collection, excavates from the imagery of life, art and modernity to create a mélange of fragmented colours in remembering the past, musing on the present and imagining the fantastic. The voice of the poet is visceral yet contemplative, sensual and surreal; it lingers with a satisfying piquancy long after it’s heard.Paperback: 106 PagesProduct Dimensions: 120 x 200 mmISBN: 9789810729448Published by Ethos Books

Corridor is a collection of short stories all set in present-day Singapore. With unsentimental clarity and heartbreaking honesty, Alfian Sa’at writes about HDB dwellers – students, housewives and factory workers, whose lives begin to unravel once they discover that happiness is a fragile thing in a country obsessed with progress and success. The characters in each story find themselves in situations that offer them a ticket to hope and change: A video camera transforms the way a resentful dau...

What if you could dream up any building you like? What would it be? How would constructing it change our lives? A shopping mall self-destructs, and a single mother vanishes. A tree house for orphans and old folks is torn apart by an act of mercy. The Singapore Flyer is reinvented as a political prison. In this collection of nine tales, Clara Chow examines an alternative Singaporean landscape—one that exists only on paper—and the people we might be in it. A former newspaper correspondent, she ...

We love Asian folklore. We grew up listening to Chinese legends, Arab fairy tales, Malay ghost stories and Indian sacred epics, and their fabulous images have continued to inhabit our imaginations ever since. Yet as grown-ups, we've sometimes been bugged by the moralistic, simplistic manner in which these fables are often told. What better way to negotiate this than to reinvent our heritage? This collection brings together 14 subversions, reinventions and adaptations of folktales from all acr...

In this era of climate crisis, in which our very futures are at stake, sustainability is a global imperative. Yet we tend to associate sustainability, nature, and the environment with distant places, science, and policy. The truth is that everything is environmental, from transportation to taxes, work to love, cities to cuisine. This book is the first to examine contemporary Singapore from an ecocultural lens, looking at the ways that Singaporean life and culture is deeply entangled with the ...

Afraid of poetry? Unable to make sense of a poem, let alone enjoy it? Having trouble discussing the web of meanings within a poem or, worse, writing about it? Confused by the kooky critical terms readers and teachers keep throwing around? Fear no longer! Literary powerhouse Gwee Li Sui takes you from the baby steps of close reading to its finer, more moving moments. He discusses with rare energising generosity two kinds of poems: the “unseen poem” – the bane of many a student – and the scarie...

What do we expect of an author who is unapologetically female? What do we expect of consuming art in general? Should a work be easy, should a work be safe? Marylyn Tan’s debut volume, GAZE BACK, complicates ideas of femininity, queerness, and the occult. The feminine grotesque subverts the restrictions placed upon the feminine body to be attractive and its subjection to notions of the ideal. The occultic counterpoint to organised religion, then, becomes a way toward techniques of empowering t...

Giving Ground refers to an act of yielding, or compromise—an active passivity, not unlike the act of writing itself. In his third collection, Theophilus Kwek enters and examines the unfamiliar, giving himself over to the power of place to transform thought and language. At the same time, he gains new ground, finding other homes and histories that change the way he sees his own city.Paperback: 76 pagesProduct Dimensions: 120 x 200 mmISBN: 9789810985998Published by Ethos Books

Growing up as a woman is hard. Growing up as a woman in the Muslim community is harder. In a world still filled with superstitions, if you die during childbirth you become a vampiric ghost and if you survive you might get attacked by a flying ghost. You collect experiences in the workplace that should be office satire but aren’t. You face constant judgement, try to live up to endless expectations, and somehow…still fall short. Growing Up Perempuan is a collection of stories written by women, ...

Heartland explores the paradox of rootedness and rootlessness facing Singaporeans born after the Japanese Occupation. Wing, who has just been conscripted, is unable to reconcile his future but unwilling to dwell in the past. He finds his own meaning in an intense attachment to his surrounding landscape. Yet, as relationships and the years slip by him, Wing is irresistibly forced to question his own certainties and the wisdom of the people he values.Paperback: 228 pagesProduct Dimensions: 130 ...

Endangered tigers connecting telepathically through time-travel; a guard's ethical dilemma at a history museum; a slaughterhouse worker's memories of his dead wife; a monochrome town upended by a wild watermelon... In This Desert, There Were Seeds is an intimate collection of past and future dreams, featuring exciting new and established literary voices from Western Australia and Singapore. From our shifting sense of community and identity, to our frustrations with existing political, social ...

Often an unnoticed caress on our faces, winds are voiceless and formless. How do we interpret them? What mysteries can we find in the whispers of winds? From a Dutch occupied Java where a witch was murdered, a dog who desires to be a Muslim, to a day in which all sense of music is lost, the mundane is aflame with the uncanny. In these stories, Fairoz Ahmad invites you to take a closer look at ordinary objects, as they take on a life of their own and spin gossamer threads. This book is a celeb...

Singapore is a mythic nation, where our ‘reality’ and ‘common sense’ are conditioned by a group of influential myths. Our main myths are examined in this collection of essays and thoughts on the social ramifications of myth-making: The Singapore Story (that our nation has a singular story), From Third World to First (our story of success), Vulnerability and Faultlines (the threats we still face despite success) and A Deficient People (the threats exist because people remain immature). Myths ...

translated by Nazry Bahrawi A rainbow is glimpsed in the enveloping darkness of Mohamed Latiff Mohamed’s stories. Precious because it is mostly fleeting—a herd of cattle finds deliverance from slavery in heroic resistance and death; a fisherman disappears of his own free will to escape the disintegration of island life. These and other characters experience conditions, often described in hyper-realistic detail, that speak to our appreciation of change, injustice, and other facts of life–religion,...

Malay Sketches is a collection of stories that borrows its name from a book of anecdotes by colonial governor Frank Swettenham, describing Malay life on the Peninsula. In Alfian Sa’at’s hands, these sketches are reimagined as flash fictions that record the lives of members of the Malay community in Singapore. With precise and incisive prose, Malay Sketches offers the reader profound insights into the realities of life as an ethnic minority.Paperback: 232 PagesProduct Dimensions: 130 x 200 mmI...

Me migrantBeyond bordersMislaying smilesDawn to dusk then dawn again Me Migrant features the poems of Md Mukul Hossine – poems originally written in Bengali by Mukul, transcreated by Singapore poet Cyril Wong based on English translations by Fariha Imran and Farouk Ahammed. It represents the voice of hope and inclusiveness, of longing and dreaming, of service and heart. This collection was born of the friendship between volunteers of community clinic HealthServe and foreign construction worke...

translated by Tan Dan Feng Featuring new translations of previously untranslated Chinese short stories, Memorandum maps out seven decades of Sinophone Singaporean literature. From bargirls to student activists, from trishaw men to tea merchants, this collection provides a glimpse into a world that has been previously invisible to Anglophone readers. Paired with critical essays, these stories showcase the richness and diversity of Singapore's Chinese community, but also its inherent interconne...

‘Tarawih’ (Arabic) comes from the root word that means to take a rest, and take rest I did. Notes After Terawih is a series of word sketches I drew based on my distracted observation during night prayers, or terawih prayers, done in a single mosque during Ramadhan. Thousands of us here in Singapore engage in terawih for thirty nights in a row – that’s a huge multitude of experiences. Yet, all these experiences are tucked within the walls of the mosque and ultimately remain in Ramadhan... As a...

parsetreeforestfire is a bilingual book of poetry in which poems in Singlish occupy one side of the book, and poems in English on the other. Conventionally such a book functions as a way for a person to learn a new language, but it remains to be seen if translation has successfully occurred, or if the book even intends to teach any reader how to speak either language. Instead, if poetry is intense attention to language, then this book can be considered to be the product of such scrutiny on th...

Peninsular, Daren Shiau's second book, is built around the inescapable motif of islands and archipelagos. The collection redeems as it explores identity and existence through notions of fragments, fragmentation and the fragility of wholeness.Paperback: 98 pagesProduct Dimensions: 120 x 200 mmISBN: 9789810849085Published by Ethos Books

PHEDRAby Euginia Tanpublished by Ethos Books * Phedra is a poetry collection of re-interpreted mythology – with an emphasis on female identity – which delves into the juxtaposition of idolatry and banality. Paperback: 84 PagesProduct Dimensions: 120 x 200 mmISBN: 9789810984175Published by Ethos Books

Why did independent Singapore celebrate two hundred years of its founding as a British colony in 2019? Why did it do so with a history dating from 1299? And what are the possibilities of doing decolonial history in Singapore? Raffles Renounced: Towards a Merdeka History presents essays by historians, literary scholars and artists which grapple with these questions. The volume also reproduces some of the source material used in the play Merdeka / 獨立 / சுதந்திரம் (Wild Rice, 2019). Taken togeth...

The Latin phrase, jus soli (“right of the soil”), is an unconditional right of a person born within the territory of a country to be conferred citizenship. Singapore’s nationality law is based on jus sanguinis (“right of blood”, in which citizenship is determined by that of one or both parents) and a modified form of jus soli (with at least one Singaporean parent). A two-time Singapore Literature Prize winner, Yong Shu Hoong contemplates how a person is invariably bound to the land on which h...

The sequel to The Law of Second Marriages, the best-selling and critically acclaimed poetry book by Christine. With "terrifying sparseness and intensity", as Cyril Wong observes, Christine threads together stories of the Separation between Singapore and Malaysia with the separation between her parents. Her searing vision, ambitious and intimate, opens up emotional spaces in unlikely places.Paperback: 94 PagesProduct Dimensions: 120 x 200 mmISBN: 9789810913717Published by Ethos Books

From a future of electronic doas and AI psychotherapists, sense-activated communion with forests and a portal to realms undersea, to a reimagined origin and afterlife—editor and translator Nazry Bahrawi brings together an exciting selection of never-before translated and new Malay spec-fic stories by established and emerging writers from Singapore. Especially in an anglophone-dominated genre, very little of Malay speculative fiction from Singapore is known to readers here and beyond. Yet cont...

Out of the mundane, a flash of lyrical. From the profane, a hint of sublime. And always, the inventive wordplay that cuts through the skin of language. Sucking up the marrow of his life, from crisis of faith to divorce, from fatherhood to being, yes, tattooed. Voices of killers and prostitutes. Poems at once intensely personal and universal about love, God and things that matter to the heart. Sudden in Youth: New and Selected Poems brings together the best of ten years of Felix Cheong’s poetr...

This anthology of short fiction presents six distinct electrifying voices from Singapore: Alfian bin Sa’at, Wena Poon, Jeffrey Lim, Tan Mei Ching, Claire Tham, and Dave Chua. The modern tales they tell are graphic, gritty, striking, and evocative. They describe experiences marked by short happiness and haunting memories, from the death of a loved one to the menacing forces of nature. The eleven stories showcased here examine the lives of an array of complex characters. These individuals are t...

"What is Singapore’s Next Big Thing?" An intellectual salvo from young and passionate Singaporeans inhabiting different slices of Singapore society, The Birthday Book is a collection of 51 essays presented as a birthday gift to the nation and its people. What are the milestones that Singapore is headed into – the next big things – in the view of this inaugural group of contributors? These individuals, younger than 45, will inherit leadership roles in their respective domains of expertise. The...

An annual publication, The Birthday Book examines emerging challenges and opportunities for Singapore, based on a selected prompt. The number of writers each year matches Singapore's age-52 for 2017, 53 for 2018, and so on. This edition presents 52 responses to "What Should We Never Forget?" The contributors have drawn from personal encounters, academic and professional experiences, and cornerstone values in their lives. Read their stories for a glimpse of our nation's spirit-mortal, vulnerab...

When 7-year-old Anna told a lie to get out of trouble, she didn’t expect her older sister to go missing. Faced with her mother’s wrath and riddled with guilt, Anna tries to make amends as she grapples with the aftermath of her actions. Until her daughter’s body is found, Su Lai refuses to believe that she has simply disappeared. Turning to a medium as her obsession to find her daughter escalates, the family is sucked into a web of pain and deceit that forces them to confront their own measure...

The captain of the Titanic went down with his ship on 15 April, 1912. But thoughts have power, and those who endure in the stories of the living are said to continue to roam the world after their deaths. And so the captain wanders in search of the things he tried to find in life, and discovers his destiny intimately entwined with a painter who shares the same fate, not knowing that their paths had crossed a long time ago. The Impermanence of Lilies is a melancholic tribute to the nature of li...

The Magic Circle tells the story of what happens when Charmaine Chan’s sister Elaine is diagnosed with a rare and aggressive cancer. As the illness progresses, family members living on different continents gather together during Elaine’s last days. Striving to distract Elaine from the worst effects of the cancer, Charmaine takes to the pen: conjuring up the vanished world of their childhood in Singapore, and discovering a way to keep her promise to Elaine’s six-year-old daughter. A contemplat...

The Sound of SCH (pronounced S-C-H) is the true story of a journey with mental illness, beautifully told by Danielle Lim from a time when she grew up witnessing her uncle's untold struggle with a crippling mental and social disease, and her mother's difficult role as caregiver. The story takes place between 1961 and 1994, backdropped by a fast-globalising Singapore where stigmatisation of persons afflicted with mental illness nevertheless remains deep-seated. Unflinchingly raw and honest in i...