Neither Here nor There

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About the Programme/Event:

What constructs your sense of place and belonging? Can we experience it in places close to the heart and further afield beyond our homeland?

Explore these questions through a panel discussion on the intertwined and antithetical feelings of place and placelessness through Wong May’s poetry and Daren Shiau’s novel, Heartland.

About the Speaker(s):

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: Tse Hao Guang (謝皓光) is the author of The International Left-Hand Calligraphy Association (Tinfish Press, 2023) and Deeds of Light (Math Paper Press, 2015), the latter shortlisted for the 2016 Singapore Literature Prize. He edits or has edited the collaborative e-journal OF ZOOS; UnFree Verse (Ethos Books, 2017), the anthology of Singapore poetry in received and nonce forms; literary food writing anthology Food Republic (Landmark Books, 2020); the new edition of Windham-Campbell prize-winning poet Wong May’s 1969 debut, A Bad Girl’s Book of Animals (Ethos Books, 2023); and Paper Jam, a literary pamphlet series (2024). He is a 2016 fellow of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, the 2018 National Writer-in-Residence at Nanyang Technological University, and a 2023 virtual resident of the National Centre for Writing at Norwich. Poems and essays appear in Poetry, Poem-a-Day, The Yale Review, Brick, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere.

Moderator: Gwee Li Sui is a poet, a graphic artist, a literary critic, and a translator. He has published seven poetry books, the latest being This Floating World; graphic novels such as Myth of the Stone; non-fiction titles such as Spiaking Singlish and FEAR NO POETRY!; and Singlish translations of four classics to date. He has also edited several acclaimed literary anthologies.

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