Narrative Threads: From Page to Dolls, Films, and VR

What if we told you that books are not the only way you can access stories? We’ve talked about how textiles have been used as a storytelling device across time and space and the special affinity that marginalised communities have for these threads that bind but there’s still so much more for us to explore.

Organised in support of The Search For Dolls, join Anittha Thanabalan and Judith Huang, two of the featured writers in Nicholas B. Chua’s literary arts project #ThisBarbieIsLit, in this intimate sharing of their thoughts and experiences on how literature can go beyond words.

Join us for a conversation to hear how Anittha’s The Lights That Find Us was adapted into this year’s Deepavali telemovie Andhadhi and the continued exploration of characters post-story, and how Judith’s dream of working in immersive multimedia expressed in Sofia and the Utopia Machine came true in working on VR project Marcus and the Shadow, which showed at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. Nicholas will then share about his current work-in-progress, a novel inspired by Table-Top RPG’s ability to fill in the gaps within our written history and how it led him to a robe worn by district chiefs in Lampung Indonesia, that he dreamed of before he saw.

About the speakers:

Anittha Thanabalan’s debut novel, The Lights That Find Us, was published in 2018. Her latest novel, It Had to Be Her is the first of a YA trilogy and was published in April 2024. Her short stories have appeared in Mahogany Journal, the fifth volume of Best New Singaporean Short Stories, and How We Live Now. When she isn’t working or writing, she can be found either walking her poodle, Dino, or attempting unnecessarily difficult jigsaw puzzles. Anittha is currently working on the sequel to It Had to Be Her.

Judith Huang is a Singaporean-Australian author, poet, science fiction translator, serial-arts-collective-founder and artist. Her novel, Sofia and the Utopia Machine, was shortlisted for the Epigram Books Fiction Prize and Singapore Book Awards. Judith has published in Asia Literary Review, Cha, QLRS, Portside Review and Mascara. She was commissioned to make the VR artwork “Marcus and the Shadow” for PICA in 2022. Judith founded YAWP!, the longest-running performance poetry competition in Singapore, co-founded Spittoon Collective in China, now in over 14 cities, and is the co-founder of Chilli Jam Open Mic in Perth.

Nicholas B. Chua has spent his life fighting cultural stereotypes of being good at maths by focusing his qi on writing instead. The result of that is short stories and literary essays published on both sides of the Atlantic. He was shortlisted for the SingLitStation Manuscript Bootcamp in 2020 and in 2023, he earned a scholarship for the HarperCollins’ Author Academy.

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