Ayam Buah Keluak and the Art of Writing | SWF Book Launch

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About the Programme

Your creativity is your gift to the world.

Award-winning author Josephine Chia illustrates this in Ayam Buah Keluak and the Art of Writing, an account of her own emotional journey of becoming a writer. She believes that creativity is a portal to our inner strengths and talents, and can help us delve deeper into more meaningful experiences.

Josephine shares the parallels between two of the things she loves most—cooking and writing. As a craft and art, each goes through similar processes of creation. Being a Peranakan, she shares her culture’s quintessential recipe, Ayam Buah Keluak, as a metaphor for her philosophy.

In this heartbreaking memoir, Josephine bares her soul so that others who are experiencing what she had gone through, will take steps to uplift, and even save, themselves. This book is her gift to them.

About the Author

Josephine Chia likes to capture vignettes of Singaporean history, life and fables in her books. She loves writing about her rich Peranakan culture and heritage. Josephine writes both fiction and non-fiction. Altogether, she has published 14 books. Ayam Buah Keluak & the Art of Writing will be her 15th book.

When she was living in the UK, she was a finalist for the Ian St James Award and won other UK literary prizes. She has a UK Masters in Creative Writing.

After her return to Singapore, she won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2014 for her nonfiction memoir, Kampong Spirit/Gotong Royong, which is based on the attap village she grew up in the 1950s. Goodbye My Kampong is a sequel to this. Her children’s novel, Queen of the Sky, was shortlisted for the Scholastic Asian Book Award 2018. In 2019, she won the Singapore Book Publishers Award for her first YA Novel, Big Tree in a Small Pot.

Josephine is a Creative Writing mentor on various writing programmes as she has a passion to nurture the future writers of Singapore. Several of her students are now published writers. She also runs Creative Writing workshops in schools and for adults.

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