Sebastian Sim
Sebastian Sim grew up in a two-room HDB flat with parents who were part of the pioneer generation of independent Singapore. Not one to shy away from the road less taken, he has travelled around the world to soak up different experiences and cultures, and tried his hand in diverse industries: a bartender at Boat Quay, an assistant outlet manager at McDonald’s, an insurance salesman, a prison officer in a maximum security prison, and a croupier in a casino.
He published three Chinese wuxia novels between 2004 and 2012, and his first English-language novel, Let’s Give It Up for Gimme Lao! (2016), was shortlisted for the 2015 Epigram Books Fiction Prize. The Riot Act won the 2017 Epigram Books Fiction Prize.
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Sandra Chua
Sandra Chua is a former magazine editor and meddlesome mother of three exasperated daughters. In addition, she's an avid bookworm, K-drama addict and Domestic Goddess wannabe. There Is No Such Thing as a Skinny Bibik is her first novel.
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Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan is a New York City-based food and fashion writer whose work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, InStyle, Marie Claire, Every Day with Rachael Ray, Family Circle, Baltimore Sun, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and many other outlets.
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She is a regular contributor to the Atlantic Food Channel. Born and raised in Singapore, Tan graduated from Northwestern University and completed two residencies at Yaddo, the artists colony. A Tiger in the Kitchen is her first book. Follow her at: twitter.com/cheryltan88." -
Vrushali Junnarkar
Vrushali Junnarkar is a dentist by training. When not practising, teaching or researching in dentistry, she contributes opinion pieces to women’s empowerment website womensweb and writes for the Times of India on various aspects of living abroad as an Indian. She has also been published in What We Inherit: Growing Up Indian (2022). Her first novel, The Campbell Gardens Ladies’ Swimming Class, won the 2023 Epigram Books Fiction Prize.
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Wong Souk Yee
Wong Souk Yee, 57, is a playwright and former political detainee, who contested the 2015 General Election as a member of the Singapore Democratic Party. An adjunct lecturer at the National University of Singapore, she co-founded the now-defunct theatre group Third Stage. In 1987, she was detained for allegedly taking part in a Marxist conspiracy against the government. She co-directed and co-wrote the play Square Moon, staged in 2013, about detention without trial.
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Wong holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of New South Wales, Sydney; a Master of Arts (Honours) in Creative Writing from the University of Western Sydney; and a Bachelor of Accountancy from the then University of Singapore. -
Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger — the co-editor of Boing Boing and the author of the YA graphic novel In Real Life, the nonfiction business book Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free, and young adult novels like Homeland, Pirate Cinema, and Little Brother and novels for adults like Rapture Of The Nerds and Makers. He is a Fellow for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.
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Cyril Wong
Cyril Wong is a two-time Singapore Literature Prize-winning poet and the recipient of the Singapore National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award for Literature. His books include poetry collections Tilting Our Plates to Catch the Light (2007) and The Lover’s Inventory (2015), novels The Last Lesson of Mrs de Souza (2013) and This Side of Heaven (2020), and fiction collection Ten Things My Father Never Taught Me (2014). He completed his doctoral degree in English Literature at the National University of Singapore in 2012. His works have been featured in the Norton anthology, Language for a New Century, in Chinese Erotic Poems by Everyman’s Library, and in magazines and journals around the world. His writings have been translated into Turkish,
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Yu-Mei Balasingamchow
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow is the co-author of the non-fiction title Singapore: A Biography (2009), and co-editor of the literary collection, In Transit: An Anthology from Singapore on Airports and Air Travel (2016). Her short fiction has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (2014), selected for the Epigram Books Collection of Best New Singaporean Short Stories, and published in the UK, US and Singapore.
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In 2015, Yu-Mei was an honorary fellow in writing at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. In 2017, she was the national writer-in-residence at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She lives in Singapore and is working on a novel.
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Kenzaburō Ōe
Kenzaburō Ōe (大江 健三郎) was a major figure in contemporary Japanese literature. His works, strongly influenced by French and American literature and literary theory, engages with political, social and philosophical issues including nuclear weapons, social non-conformism and existentialism.
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Ōe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994 for creating "an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today." -
Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan is a New York City-based food and fashion writer whose work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, InStyle, Marie Claire, Every Day with Rachael Ray, Family Circle, Baltimore Sun, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and many other outlets.
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She is a regular contributor to the Atlantic Food Channel. Born and raised in Singapore, Tan graduated from Northwestern University and completed two residencies at Yaddo, the artists colony. A Tiger in the Kitchen is her first book. Follow her at: twitter.com/cheryltan88." -
Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai
Born and raised in Việt Nam, Dr. Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is the author of the international bestseller The Mountains Sing, runner-up for the 2021 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, winner of the 2020 BookBrowse Best Debut Award, the 2021 International Book Awards, the 2021 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, and the 2020 Lannan Literary Award Fellowship for Fiction. She has published twelve books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction in Vietnamese and English and has received some of the top literary prizes in Việt Nam including the Poetry of the Year 2010 from the Hà Nội Writers Association. Her writing has been translated into twenty languages and has appeared in major publications including the New York Times. She has a PhD in Creative Writin
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Jeremy Tiang
Jeremy Tiang is the author of State of Emergency (2017, finalist for the 2016 Epigram Books Fiction Prize) and It Never Rains on National Day (2015, shortlisted for the 2016 Singapore Literature Prize). He won the Golden Point Award for Fiction in 2009 for his story "Trondheim". He also writes and translates plays, including A Dream of Red Pavilions, The Last Days of Limehouse, A Son Soon by Xu Nuo, and Floating Bones by Quah Sy Ren and Han Lao Da. Tiang has translated more than ten books from the Chinese—including novels by Chan Ho-Kei, Zhang Yueran, Yeng Pway Ngon and Su Wei-chen—and has received an NEA Literary Translation Fellowship, a PEN/Heim Translation Grant, and a People’s Literature Award Mao-Tai Cup. He currently lives in Brookly
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Jing-Jing Lee
Jing-Jing Lee is the author of HOW WE DISAPPEARED (Oneworld and Hanover Square Press, May 2019). Born and raised in Singapore, she graduated from Oxford’s Creative Writing Master’s in 2011 and has since seen her poetry and short stories published in various journals and anthologies. Lee's novella, If I Could Tell You, was published by Marshall Cavendish in 2013 and her debut poetry collection, And Other Rivers, was published by Math Paper Press in 2015.
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Amanda Lee Koe
Born and raised in Singapore, Amanda Lee Koe has lived in Beijing, Berlin and Bangkok and is now based in New York.
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She was the youngest winner of the Singapore Literature Prize for the short story collection Ministry of Moral Panic (Epigram, 2014), shortlisted for the Frankfurt Book Fair's LiBeraturpreis and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt's International Literature Prize.
Her debut novel, Delayed Rays of A Star (Doubleday, 2019), won the Henfield Prize, awarded to the best work of fiction by an MFA candidate at Columbia University's School of the Arts. It was a Straits Times #1 Bestseller, and an NPR Best Book of the Year.
Her second novel, Sister Snake (Ecco, 2024), was a Gold House Book Club pick, a RuPaul’s Allstora Sapphic Book Club se -
Balli Kaur Jaswal
Balli Kaur Jaswal's latest novel is The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters (Harper Collins/William Morrow). Her previous novels include Inheritance, which won the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelist Award, and Sugarbread, a finalist for the Epigram Books Fiction Prize and the Singapore Literature Prize. Her third novel Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows was translated into 15 languages and chosen by Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine book club.
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Jemimah Wei
Author of The Original Daughter, forthcoming Spring 2025 from Doubleday Books (US) and Weidenfeld & Nicolson (UK).
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Reader of Literally Everything.
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Wong Souk Yee
Wong Souk Yee, 57, is a playwright and former political detainee, who contested the 2015 General Election as a member of the Singapore Democratic Party. An adjunct lecturer at the National University of Singapore, she co-founded the now-defunct theatre group Third Stage. In 1987, she was detained for allegedly taking part in a Marxist conspiracy against the government. She co-directed and co-wrote the play Square Moon, staged in 2013, about detention without trial.
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Wong holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of New South Wales, Sydney; a Master of Arts (Honours) in Creative Writing from the University of Western Sydney; and a Bachelor of Accountancy from the then University of Singapore. -
Yeoh Jo-Ann
Yeoh Jo-Ann is the author of Impractical Uses of Cake, winner of the 2018 Epigram Books Fiction Prize. Formerly a features editor, she is currently eyebrows deep in digital media/marketing. Her fiction has been anthologised in We R Family, In Transit and Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume Three.
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Nuraliah Norasid
Nuraliah binte Norasid is the winner of the 2016 Epigram Books Fiction Prize, for her debut novel The Gatekeeper. She holds a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from Nanyang Technological University, and works as a research associate at the Centre for Research on Islamic and Malay Affairs (RIMA), where she studies marginalities and the confluence of religious ideas and secular society. Her writing has been published in QLRS, Karyawan Magazine, AMPlified and Perempuan: Muslim Women Speak Out.
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Rachel Heng
Rachel Heng is the author of the novels The Great Reclamation (Riverhead, 2023) and Suicide Club (Henry Holt, 2018), which has been translated into ten languages. Rachel's short fiction has been published in The New Yorker, McSweeney's Quarterly, Glimmer Train, Kenyon Review, longlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award, and recognized by anthologies including Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions and Best New Singaporean Short Stories. Her non-fiction has been listed among Best American Essays’ Notable Essays and published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire and elsewhere. She has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Sewanee Writers' Co
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Meihan Boey
Meihan Boey is the author of novels The Formidable Miss Cassidy (co-winner of the 2021 Epigram Books Fiction Prize and winner of the 2022 Singapore Book Award for Best Literary Work) and The Enigmatic Madam Ingram (finalist for the 2023 Epigram Books Fiction Prize), and science fiction novella The Messiah Virus. She is also the vice president of the Association of Comic Artists of Singapore and has scripted several comics, including Supacross and The Once and Marvellous DKD. She is a dedicated comic book and manga fan, an enthusiastic gamer, a persistent triathlete, and not yet a Super Saiyan, though she keeps trying.
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Jesse Q. Sutanto
Jesse Q Sutanto grew up shuttling back and forth between Jakarta and Singapore and sees both cities as her homes. She has a Masters degree from Oxford University, though she has yet to figure out a way of saying that without sounding obnoxious. She is currently living back in Jakarta on the same street as her parents and about seven hundred meddlesome aunties. When she's not tearing out her hair over her latest WIP, she spends her time baking and playing FPS games. Oh, and also being a mom to her two kids.
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Imran Hashim
Imran Hashim fell in love with France a little late in life (in his teens) but made up for it by studying French with a vengeance at university, and then going on to the Sorbonne and Sciences Po Paris for postgraduate studies. Apart from providing the inspiration for his first novel, his time in Paris was a period of self-discovery, chief amongst which was an undying love for pear tarts with chocolate bits inside.
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Yeoh Jo-Ann
Yeoh Jo-Ann is the author of Impractical Uses of Cake, winner of the 2018 Epigram Books Fiction Prize. Formerly a features editor, she is currently eyebrows deep in digital media/marketing. Her fiction has been anthologised in We R Family, In Transit and Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume Three.
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Cyril Wong
Cyril Wong is a two-time Singapore Literature Prize-winning poet and the recipient of the Singapore National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award for Literature. His books include poetry collections Tilting Our Plates to Catch the Light (2007) and The Lover’s Inventory (2015), novels The Last Lesson of Mrs de Souza (2013) and This Side of Heaven (2020), and fiction collection Ten Things My Father Never Taught Me (2014). He completed his doctoral degree in English Literature at the National University of Singapore in 2012. His works have been featured in the Norton anthology, Language for a New Century, in Chinese Erotic Poems by Everyman’s Library, and in magazines and journals around the world. His writings have been translated into Turkish,
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Yu-Mei Balasingamchow
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow is the co-author of the non-fiction title Singapore: A Biography (2009), and co-editor of the literary collection, In Transit: An Anthology from Singapore on Airports and Air Travel (2016). Her short fiction has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (2014), selected for the Epigram Books Collection of Best New Singaporean Short Stories, and published in the UK, US and Singapore.
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In 2015, Yu-Mei was an honorary fellow in writing at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. In 2017, she was the national writer-in-residence at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She lives in Singapore and is working on a novel.
Author photo copyright Thomas Langdon. -
Haresh Sharma
Haresh is Resident Playwright of The Necessary Stage and co-Artistic Director of the annual M1 Singapore Fringe Festival. To date, he has written more than 100 plays. His play, Off Centre, was selected by the Ministry of Education as a Literature text for N and O Levels, and republished by The Necessary Stage in 2006. In 2008, Ethos Books published Interlogue: Studies in Singapore Literature, Vol. 6, written by Prof David Birch and edited by A/P Kirpal Singh, which presented an extensive investigation of Haresh's work over the past 20 years. A collection of Haresh’s plays have been translated into Mandarin and published by Global Publishing with the title '哈里斯·沙玛剧作选'.
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Haresh was awarded Best Original Script for Fundamentally Happy, Good Peop -
Jennani Durai
Jennani Durai is the author of Regrettable Things That Happened Yesterday (Epigram Books, 2017), which was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize for Fiction in 2018. She is a former journalist, a VONA/Voices Fellow for 2016 and a co-author of the official commemorative book of Singapore's 50th birthday, Living The Singapore Story (2015). Her fiction has appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Eastern Heathens and Best New Singaporean Short Stories (Vol 2). She lives in Guatemala with her husband.
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Dave Chua
Malaysian-born author and freelance writer Dave Chua, who contributes to various publications including The Straits Times, first came to literary prominence in 1995, when he was a joint winner of the SPH-NAC Golden Point Award for English short story. The following year, his first novel Gone Case received the Singapore Literature Prize Commendation Award. A resident of Singapore for most of his life, Dave has long worked the media industry, organising film festivals such as the annual Animation Nation (since 2005) and participating in various TV and corporate production projects. He also teaches ad-hoc and is actively involved with the Singapore Film Society as Vice Chairman.
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Daryl Qilin Yam
Daryl Qilin Yam (b. 1991) is a writer, editor and arts organiser from Singapore. Shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize and nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award, he is the author of two novels, a novella and the bestselling short story collection Be Your Own Bae (2024). He co-founded the literary charity Sing Lit Station, where he presently serves as the managing editor of its publishing arm AFTERIMAGE.
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His writing has appeared in periodicals and publications such as the Berlin Quarterly, the Sewanee Review, The Straits Times and The Epigram Books Collection of Best New Singapore Short Stories anthology series. His first novel, Kappa Quartet (2016), was selected by The Business Times as one of the best novels of the -
Nisha Mehraj
Nisha Mehraj left full-time teaching and became a private tutor so she could pursue writing. The only home she has ever known is Singapore, yet she lives vicariously through her characters and escapes into the safety of the worlds she creates. The many strong women she has met and read about, and her own grandmother’s determination to raise her three daughters as independent thinking women, taught her to have ambitions and gave her the courage to dream. Her short story “Chai” was published in Mascara Literary Review in 2012. We Do Not Make Love Here is her first novel.
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