One of the few multilingual literary festivals in the world, the Singapore Writers Festival (SWF) returns this year with its 25th edition. Happening from 4 to 20 November, the literary arts festival makes a comeback in full force since the pandemic.
This year’s festival theme, ‘If’, hopes to encapsulate the feelings of hope and a second chance to allow for retrospection and ideation, explains festival director and poet Pooja Nansi. With more than 200 programmes over three festival weekends, there’s a programme for everyone – from children, youth to adults.
Here, we pick out some of the top festival highlights to check out, amidst the exciting line-up of immersive experiences, exhibitions, performances, film screenings, meet-the-author sessions and panel discussions.
To mark the festival’s 25th milestone, this year’s SWF is launching a first-of-its-kind initiative. Past festival directors are invited to reprise and reimagine their respective SWF editions’ popular programmes for audiences today.
SWF 2015 festival director Yeow Kai Chai is bringing back the popular Secret Sayang Sessions, where audiences commit to an intimate 30-minute session with an unknown author at a secret location to talk about what they feel about sayang and how it features in their work.
Paul Tan, on the other hand, will re-introduce Dialect Storytelling for Families from SWF 2013 and 2014 to delight audiences once again with charming nursery rhymes and stories of yore in the dialects of Cantonese, Hainanese, Hakka, Hokkien and Teochew. He will also helm three mini-talks, where presenters debate on the prevalence and relevance of the concept of a literary canon.
This year’s festival headliners are notable literary talents hailing from different parts of the globe. These include include multi-award-winning American writer Claudia Rankine; Chinese writer Tung Chiao, whose essay collections have won the Hong Kong Biennial Awards for Chinese Literature; American author Lois Lowry, best known for the young adult dystopian novel The Giver; American science fiction writer Ted Chiang whose short story Story of Your Life was the basis of the 2016 film ‘Arrival’; and renowned Indian artist, Trotsky Marudu, whose multi-faceted work demonstrates the power of art and technology to tell the stories of Tamils the world over.
The festival promises to not leave “Gen Z literary arts lovers out of the fun”, with a series of programmes curated for youths by youths. Young Adult writers are making a strong showing this year, including the likes of Kass Morgan, who penned the hit series The 100 which inspired the television show on The CW Television Network; Dustin Thao, author of the sensational romance novel You’ve Reached Sam; and New York Times bestselling author Chloe Gong, author of fantasy novel These Violent Delights.
Other highlights include a talk, ‘Is it On #BookTok?’, which explores the impact of social media in the literary scene; insights to the gaming industry, gameplay and game writing, through collaborations with Singapore Games Association and Jio Play Game; and select Sing Lit texts are turned into table-top gameplays by Curious Chimeras.
A range of educational and family-friendly programmes will be made available under SWF Playground, where children are encouraged to think out of the box and create their own stories through talks, workshops, and storytelling sessions.
They’ll get to meet a real-life astrophysicist in a book talk by Lisa Harvey-Smith which is part of a series of programmes featuring women writers in STEM; embark on a tour of Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan’s floating cardboard city, Head/Home, at the National Gallery Singapore Children’s Biennale; and meet the creator of the popular Treehouse Series by Andy Griffiths.
The annual Literary Pioneer Exhibition celebrates some of the most prominent literary figures in the local scene. This year’s edition makes its mark as the first exhibition in Singapore to celebrate the contributions of our Malay female Literary Pioneers. Spanning the early 20th century from pre- independence to the present day, the exhibition commemorates the life and works of literary pioneers Raja Aisyah Sulaiman, Adibah Amin, Dr Hadijah Rahmat, Dr Sa’eda Buang, Rasiah Halil as well as the collective, Kumpulan Bebas Melata.
For more information on this year’s Singapore Writers Festival, click here.