Heartlands Now and Then

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About the Programme:

How has the Singaporean heartland changed, and what might it look like in the future?

In this panel discussion of real and imagined spaces, reminisce bygone places and eras preserved in Daren Shiau’s novel ‘Heartland’ and Gareth Phua’s photography, and delve into the imaginary, urban possibilities of a future Singapore through Clara Chow’s Dream Storeys.

Moderated by Ng Keng Gene, this panel discussion explores our urban environment as a physical and emotional landscape which shapes our human experience and vice versa.

About the Speakers:

Panellist: Daren Shiau is a fiction writer, poet and editor. He was the National Arts Council’s Young Artist of the Year in 2002, and has been described by The Arts Magazine as "among the most exciting" of the post-independence generation of Singapore writers. His works include a novel (Heartland (1999)), a poetry collection (Peninsular: Archipelagos and Other Islands (2000)), and a microfiction collection (Velouria (2007)). In 2021, he was appointed as Co-Chair of the Singapore Writers Festival's advisory panel.

Heartland, has been cited by Lonely Planet as "the definitive Singapore novel" received the Singapore Literature Prize Commendation Award in 1998 together with Alfian Sa'at's Corridor. In 2007, an academic edition of Heartland was adopted into a textbook for Singapore secondary schools offering English literature in their GCE O-Level curriculum.

In 2015, Heartland was selected by as one of the Top 10 English Singapore books from 1965 to 2015, alongside titles by Arthur Yap, Goh Poh Seng, Philip Jeyaretnam , and Amanda Lee Koe. In the same year, MediaCorp commissioned the adaptation of Heartland into a telemovie directed by K Rajagopal. Heartland, the telemovie, was broadcast in August 2015.

Panellist: Clara Chow is a writer and publisher at Hermit Press. A former journalist, her works have been shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize and supported by residencies at the University of Iowa, Toji Cultural Center in South Korea, and the Shanghai Writers' Association.

Panellist: Gareth Phua is a Singapore-based photographer and adjunct lecturer with the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts. He has a passion for creating images that document architecture and public spaces as a visual archive of these spaces that may be lost to us for good. Gareth uses cameras as a tool to capture interesting architecture and the ever-changing city skyline of Singapore in a visual manner and hopes his photographs can serve as an archive for his children and the future generation.

Moderator: Keng Gene is a journalist who reports on land use and heritage issues for The Straits Times. His stories largely reflect changes in Singapore's built environment, and he has an interest in the impact of these changes on social memories, identity and one's sense of belonging.

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