SINGAPORE – Hear from two-time Giller Prize winner and chair of the 2023 Booker Prize jury Esi Edugyan, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gregory Pardlo and New York Times best-selling academic Cat Bohannon at the Singapore Writers Festival (SWF) 2024.
Other big names revealed on Sept 3 include Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka, of The Seven Moons Of Maali Almeida (2020) fame, and Taiwanese prose stylist Kuo Chiang-sheng.
Also coming to town for the literary tentpole event is multi-hyphenate Indonesian artist Dee Lestari, who has released songs in tandem with her acclaimed short stories, and popular young-adult fiction writers Krystal Sutherland from Australia and Rin Chupeco from the Philippines.
First-time festival director Yong Shu Hoong and organiser Arts House Limited announced some of SWF’s line-up and the more than 200 programmes available from Nov 8 to 17 at a Goodman Arts Centre preview.
Themed In Our Nature, SWF 2024 invites attendees to reflect both on the environment as well as their own nature, as writers and readers, and as humans beings.
Festival passes can now be bought at www.singaporewritersfestival.com for $30, with an early-bird discount of 20 per cent if purchased before Oct 14.
Yong, who has pledged to reach out to the literary and non-literary crowd, has stacked the menu with more topical discussions than his predecessors. His focus on the environment not only includes poets coming together to map how their verses engage nature, but also academics who will offer pragmatic advice on climate action.
The typically uproarious festival debate bears the motion This House Believes That Life In Plastic Is Fantastic, and has been moved from an opening event to a closing one.
Bohannon and Lestari will deliver the two festival keynote lectures, with Bohannon particularly of-the-moment.
The author of the seminal Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years Of Human Evolution (2023) traces a feminist story as far back as 200 million years, arguing that the development of core traits crucial to humanity’s survival – mammalian milk, upright posture, brains and the capacity for love – has been driven by changes in the female body and not the male one.
In the process, the researcher problematises the way medical science has treated the male body as the default and the female as “a minor tweak on a Platonic form”, while re-asserting the importance of the body in contemporary discourses of sex and gender.
Perhaps controversially for an arts event, Yong is also inaugurating a Tech Talks series, which gets speakers to demystify tech- and finance-speak for the layperson and elaborate on how they can sit uneasily with literature.
As he had promised, more authors writing in different languages have been programmed in the same event.
A panel engages theatre practitioners in a discussion on multilingualism on the Singapore stage; there is a roundtable on traditional Chinese, Malay and Tamil poetry in Singapore; and four intercultural speakers engaged in art forms outside their ethnic spaces – a Malay Chinese calligrapher, an Indian xinyao composer-singer – help people envision what it means to inhabit these hybridities.
For children, creator of the Geronimo Stilton book series Elisabetta Dami will appear virtually, with characters from the series making in-person appearances to crank up the entertainment.
The 2024 festival is supported by the embassy of South Korea, and among South Koreans flown in is Anton Hur, translator of K-pop boy band BTS’ memoir as well as Baek Se-hee’s therapy memoir, I Want To Die But I Want To Eat Tteokbokki (2018).
SWF 2024 will continue its staple literary pioneer series, this year honouring Cultural Medallion recipient poet Lew Poo Chan – better known by her pen name Dan Ying – with a touring exhibition and a live performance of musical interpretations of her work.
