The 21st edition of the festival celebrates the world’s leading writers and thinkers, and addresses social, cultural, environmental and economic topics with the theme 界 (jiè).
SINGAPORE – The buzz has begun for the 21st edition of Singapore Writers Festival (SWF) as the Advance Sales for its popular Festival Passes have been made available. With a series of programmes centred around the theme of 界 (jiè) – alluding to “the world(s) we live in” – SWF, which is one of the world’s few truly multi-lingual and multi-cultural literary festivals, invites audiences to reflect on what it means to be a citizen of the world through delving into a broad spectrum of topics including immigration, multi-culturalism, climate change, and the imagination of endless boundaries through augmented and virtual realities. Organised by the National Arts Council (NAC), SWF will be held in the Civic District from 2 to 11 November 2018.
Some topics include whether human autonomy exists in a digital age by German writer Miriam Meckel and a discussion on the state by the world by British poet Simon Armitage. The popular Festival Pass allows audiences entry into more than 100 events and access to a slate of programmes – from panel discussions and classroom series, to author dialogues and film screenings – at a discounted price of S$20 (20% off the full price) for a limited period only. As part of the Council’s efforts to provide everyone with opportunities to experience and appreciate literary arts, the Festival Pass is an easy, value-for-money entry point for festival-goers to meet a variety of fiction writers, poets, spoken-word performers, graphic novelists, philosophers and thought leaders from all over the world. Some authors you could meet with the Festival Pass include Edwin Thumboo (Singapore), Margaret Stohl (US), Xia Jia (China) and Paul French (UK).
界 (jiè), a Chinese character with multiple meanings, is commonly used to refer to the world we live in. It can also be used to express the idea of endless worlds ranging from an imagined dominion of one’s mind and virtual reality, to geographical and man-made boundaries. SWF remains a key platform to bring different communities together to revel in the realm of imagination and offer new insights into how stories shape the way we see ourselves and the identities we take on, which in turn helps us better understand our experiences in the world we live in.
Sixteen Singaporean and international writers from multiple literary genres and languages are announced as part of the Advance Sales of the SWF Festival Pass. With the Festival Pass, festival-goers get access to writers whose works span across different genres, such as:
Poetry
- Simon Armitage (UK): Multi prize-winning poet and novelist whose sardonic wit and relatability has broken down boundaries and made poetry accessible to the masses.
- Edwin Thumboo (Singapore): A first-generation home-grown Singapore literature (SingLit) poet and Cultural Medallion recipient who has worked tirelessly to empower a younger generation of poets.
- Wong Yoon Wah (Singapore): Chinese writer, poet, scholar and critic whose works largely focus on Southeast Asian tributaries.
- Ali Cobby Eckermann (Australia): The first aboriginal Australian to receive the international Windham-Campbell Literary Prize for Poetry is also the author of Inside My Mother (2015), an award-winning poetry collection that explores the separation and reunion of a mother and child across generations.
Fiction
- Margaret Stohl (US): New York Times bestselling Young Adult author and Marvel Comics writer who challenges gender norms by being a female comic writer in a male-dominated industry.
- Xia Jia (China): Award-winning Chinese science-fiction writer whose stories have won China’s most prestigious science-fiction prize, the Galaxy Award.
- Anna Holmwood (UK): Award-winning translator who translates from Chinese and Swedish to English. Her portfolio of work, such as the translation of Chinses classic Legends of the Condor Heroes, has enabled previously inaccessible work to become accessible for English-speaking readers.
- Intan Paramaditha (Indonesia): An Indonesian novelist and scholar whose stories are often inspired by horror writing, myths and fairy tales.
- Sharlene Teo (Singapore): Emerging Singaporean author whose debut novel Ponti, which hints at the supernatural, bagged the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writers’ Award in 2016.
Non-fiction
- Sarah Churchwell (US): American Literature professor whose research topics include a rhetorical history of the phrases “American Dream” and “American First”. She is also the director of the Being Human festival, a festival which explores how humanities help us understand ourselves, our relationships with others, and the challenges we face in a changing world.
- Paul French (UK): New York Times bestselling British author on modern Chinese history and contemporary Chinese society.
Film
- Tran Anh Hung (France): Vietnamese-born French film director best known for his adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s bestselling novel Norwegian Wood (1987).
- Ra Chezhiyan (India): Director of the National Award-winning Tamil film To Let (2017), who has also written a book on cinema that was published as a series in India’s Tamil weekly Ananda Vikatan between 2005 and 2007.
SWF COUNTRY FOCUS: GERMANY
This year’s Country Focus is Germany, a multi-cultural country with a rich literary legacy. Several German writers and speakers will be participating in SWF this year, including: spoken word artist Fatima Moumouni whose works focus on urban youth culture; prominent journalist, author of My Head is Mine: A Journey Through the Brainy New World of Brainhacking and 2001 winner of the Cicero Speaker Prize in the category of science Miriam Meckel; as well as German novelist Julia Franck, whose book Die Mittagsfrau (The Blind Side of the Heart), set in two tumultuous post-war periods of World War I and II, won the German Book Prize in 2007.
Vicky is the co-founder of TravelDailyNews Media Network where she is the Editor-in Chief. She is also responsible for the daily operation and the financial policy. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Tourism Business Administration from the Technical University of Athens and a Master in Business Administration (MBA) from the University of Wales. She has many years of both academic and industrial experience within the travel industry. She has written/edited numerous articles in various tourism magazines.
