Singaporean Fiction

Friday, March 25, 2011

Fiction writing in English did not start in earnest until after independence. Short stories flourished as a literary form, the novel arrived much later. Goh Poh Seng remains a pioneer in writing novels well before many of the later generation, with titles like If We Dream Too Long (1972) – widely recognised as the first true Singaporean novel – and A Dance of Moths (1995).

Beginning as a short story writer, Penang-born Catherine Lim has been Singapore's most widely read author, thanks partly to her first two books of short stories, Little Ironies: Stories of Singapore (1978) and Or Else, The Lightning God and Other Stories (1980). These two books were incorporated as texts for the GCE 'O' Levels. Lim's themes of Asian male chauvinistic gender-dominance mark her as a distant cousin to Asian-American writers such as Amy Tan. She has also been writing novels, such as The Bondmaid (1998) and Following the Wrong God Home (2001), and publishing them to an international audience since the late 1990s.

Han May is the pseudonym of Joan Hon who is better known for her non-fiction books. Her science-fiction romance Star Sapphire (1985) won a High Commendation Award from the Book Development Council of Singapore in 1986, the same year when she was also awarded a Commendation prize for her better-known book Relatively Speaking on her family and childhood memories.

Rex Shelley hails from an earlier colonial generation, although he began publishing only in the early 1990s. A Eurasian, his first novel The Shrimp People (1991) examines the regional Eurasian community and their experience in Singapore. The book won a National Book Prize. His three other novels, People of the Pear Tree (1993), Island in the Centre (1995) and River of Roses (1998) all examine similar themes of the Eurasian community in the Southeast Asia region. He has won the S.E.A. Write Award in 2007.

Haresh Sharma is a playwright who has written more than fifty plays that have been staged all over the world, including Singapore, Melbourne, Glasgow, Birmingham, Cairo and London.[1] In May 2010, his highly acclaimed play Those Who Can't, Teach was published in book form by the independent publisher Epigram Books.

Su-Chen Christine Lim's works consider varied themes surrounding issues of gender, immigration and orthodoxy. In 1993, her novel, Fistful of Colours, was awarded the first Singapore Literature Prize. Her other novels take up the relationship between the Malays and Chinese immigrants in colonial Malaya, and the issue of land (A Bit of Earth).

Gopal Baratham, a neurosurgeon, started as a short story writer and later wrote politically-charged works like A Candle or the Sun (1991) and Sayang (1991), which courted some controversy when they were first published.

Jean Tay is an economist-turned-playwright. Her play Everything but the Brain won the Best Original Script at The Straits Times' Life! Theatre Awards in 2006. Two of her plays, Everything but the Brain and Boom, were published in book form by the Singapore-based independent publisher Epigram Books.

Augustine Goh Sin Tub who began his writing career writing in Malay, burst on the literary scene after his retirement with more than a dozen books of short stories, most of which were founded on his own personal history, thus making them part fiction and part non-fiction. Works like One Singapore and its two sequels One Singapore 2 and One Singapore 3 have found fans among the different strata of Singapore society and well acclaimed by all.

Around this time, younger writers emerged. Claire Tham and Ovidia Yu wrote short stories, while playwright Stella Kon put forth her lesser-known science-fiction novel, Eston (1995). Of the younger generation, Philip Jeyaretnam has shown promise but has not published a new novel since Abraham's Promise (1995). His first two books, First Loves (1987) and Raffles Place Ragtime (1988), were bestsellers in Singapore.

Kelvin Tan, a musician and playwright, has been sporadically in sight, publishing the works All Broken Up and Dancing (1992) and the Nethe(r);R (2001). Colin Cheong can perhaps lay claim to being one of Singapore's most prolific contemporary authors, releasing three novels, one novella, two short story collections, and dozens of non-fictional works thus far. He won the Singapore Literature Prize in 1996 for his travel diary-like novel Tangerine. Daren Shiau's Heartland (1999) traces an eighteen-year-old's rites of passage from junior college through to enlistment and thereafter. The novel has been selected to be a set text at secondary school level.

Hwee Hwee Tan graduated with a First Class Honours from the University of East Anglia, and a Masters from Oxford University. She grew up in Singapore and in the Netherlands, and her cosmopolitan experience can be readily seen in her novels. Her snazzy, humorous prose can be read in Foreign Bodies (1997) and Mammon Inc. (2001), both published by Penguin Books. Simon Tay, currently the chairperson of Singapore Institute of International Affairs and a former nominated Member of Parliament, has a short story collection and a novel under his belt. These are Stand Alone (1991) and City of Small Blessings (2009).