Love Makes Us Belong

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This programme/event is open to members of the National Library Board, Singapore. Please ensure you have your myLibrary username on hand before proceeding with the registration. If you do not have a myLibrary username, you can create one here: https://account.nlb.gov.sg/.

About the Programme/Event:

What does love mean to us? Love transforms a house into a home, everyday moments into treasured rituals and ordinary life into an adventure. Love can even immortalize memories into places of belonging that we return to time and time again for solace. Join our speakers, the authors of And Softly Go the Crossings (2020) and Grandma’s Attic Mom’s HDB My Wallpaper (2021), in this hour-long panel discussion to hear about love which grounds us, even as we travel across continents and journey through different phases of our lives.

The second hour of the programme features an exclusive sharing of select manuscripts related to the authors invited. Drawn from the National Library’s Closed Stacks collection, join us to see and hear about the curated display of manuscripts up close and personal on a Curator’s Tour led by librarian Michelle Heng

This programme is a joint initiative by the National Arts Council and the National Library Board.

About the Speaker(s):

Speaker: Danielle Lim is an award-winning author of four books. Her short story collection, And Softly Go the Crossings, won Book of the Year and Best Literary Work in the Singapore Book Awards 2021. Her memoir, The Sound of SCH: A Mental Breakdown, a Life Journey, won the Singapore Literature Prize 2016 (non-fiction), and has been translated to Chinese and Tamil, published in Taiwan and India. Her latest novel, All Our Brave, Earthly Scars, was published by Penguin Random House in 2022.

The Publishers Weekly (US) listed Danielle as one of Singapore’s top writers in 2016. She has been invited to speak at writers’ festivals internationally, including Australia, Malaysia and Singapore. Her works have been featured in The Straits Times, BiblioAsia, The West Australian, on radio 938Now and ABC Radio Australia. She has been interviewed on Great People TV, The Brand Called You, and the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore.

Speaker: Heng Siok Tian’s most recent collection is Grandma’s Attic, Mom’s HDB, My Wallpaper (2021). Her other collections include Crossing the Chopsticks and Other Poems (1993), My City, My Canvas (1999), Contouring, (2004), Is my body a myth (2011) and Mixing Tongues (2011).

She co-authored The Adopted: Stories from Angkor (2015), Lost Bodies: Poems between Portugal and home (2016) and Lilla Torg (2023).

Her short play, The Lift, staged in 1991, was read at the Third International Women Playwrights’ Conference in Adelaide in 1994.

In 2000, she was a Fellow with the Iowa International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, USA on a National Arts Council Fellowship. She participated in literary events in China (1999), USA (2000), Philippines (2001), Stockholm and Sweden (2007) and France (2012).

Moderator: Daryl Lim Wei Jie is a poet, editor and translator from Singapore. His poetry collection, Anything but Human, was a finalist for the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize. He conceptualised two anthologies: Food Republic: A Singapore Literary Banquet, which won a Special Award at the 2023 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards, and The Second Link: An Anthology of Malaysian and Singaporean Writing, shortlisted for Best Literary Work at the Singapore Book Awards. He translated Short Tongue, a collection by the Singaporean Chinese poet Wang Mun Kiat. In 2023, he was awarded the Young Artist Award, Singapore’s highest award for young art practitioners. www.darylwjlim.com 

About the Book(s):

- In this collection of short stories, Singapore Literature Prize-winner Danielle Lim probes the unseen changes which take place in the human psyche and their impact on the textures of life. Weaving through pain and healing, beauty and darkness, these silent crossings of the human heart and mind are deep and formidable. Yet they often go unnoticed due to their quiet, subtle nature. From a man struggling to bridge the distance between him and his father as his father dies, to the changes in the human psyche
when people are pit competitively against one another, these stories seek to draw out the emotional and psychological threads which form the tapestry of lived experience.

With its portraits of love and loss, loneliness and heartache, hope and healing, And Softly Go the Crossings challenges the reader to encounter human connectedness through soft, yet powerful, inner rhythms.

- In her sixth collection of poetry where the real, virtual and literary mix, Heng Siok Tian travels through landscapes and explores relationships of family, friendships, the familiar and the foreign. With her signature simplicity and honesty, she tenderly ferries her deceased mother to the realm of memory while she reflects on the commotions of life at home and abroad. Through these, she reminds readers that the past contains limitless potential for journeys of the imagination, and that nostalgia can be both gentle and powerful.

- Four writers. Three travelling in Portugal. One staying behind to care for his ailing mother. One long-distance writing affair.

The passing of the mother together with memories of other losses and absences come together in Lost Bodies, a meditation on the transience of time and love and an invitation to get away—physically or spiritually—from worldly concerns to explore a different history, a different culture, a different light, laced with dreamy scents and the faint calls of fado.

Host or Publisher GoLibrary | National Library Board, Singapore