About: Unlock SingLit through the myriad world of voice, music, and sound - through a compilation album featuring poems in English, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil. Poems on Air is a digital installation bringing Singapore literature across the island through a broadcast network. Transforming words from a page into auditory tickles, SingLit can now be heard and experienced through the world of sound.
Listen to local poems about everyday life, the kampung spirit, and uncles here: https://artwave.studio/poemsonair
Featured SingLit:
1) 三四行 (Three Four Lines) by Wong Koi Tet
2) "Uncle" from Bang My Car by Ann Ang
3) Engkau Hanya Bumi Bagiku (You Are Only Earth To Me) by Shahirah Nassir
4) நகர்வளம் (Urban Riches) by Amiroudine
About: Sing Lit Sounds is an auditory and textual experience that pays homage to three of Singapore's official languages, Malay, Chinese and Tamil. Commissioned by #BuySingLit, explore primordial music tracks produced exclusively by musicians, .gif, Fauxe and Mantravine.
Listen to the tracks and add them to your playlists:
1) .gif
2) Fauxe
3) Mantravine
Read more about the featured extracts and the artists here.
About: Tusitala adapted the print book into a free browser-based experience, enhancing the existing narrative with interactivity, web and mobile effects, and sound. The experience targets readers to new SingLit particularly people below 35 and are interested in science-fiction, choose-your-own-adventure stories, and narrative games. Through this project, Tusitala gained insights into reader behaviour and preferences, and use the data to commission native content in the future.
Try it out here: https://somewhere-else.tusitalabooks.com
Featured SingLit: Somewhere Else, Another You is a literary gamebook inspired by theories of the multiverse. Each time the reader makes a choice, the universe of the narrative splits, creating a story in which all outcomes exist at the same time but cannot be experienced concurrently. A cross between a Pick Your Own Path novel and an existential crisis, this book invites you to meander through its paths, and towards your own conclusions.
Author: Tania De Rozario
Publisher: Math Paper Press (2018)
About: Experience horror come to life through 360º illustrations, accompanied by clips from audiobooks by Storytel. Four illustrators interpret a scene from four local stories by Catherine Lim, Clara Chow Daryl Qilin Yam and Suffian Hakim, bringing you their versions of nightmares to you via VR headsets. First showcased at Textures 2020, this free 5-10 min immersive experience brings writing, audiobooks, and illustration together to introduce SingLit to the public in a new and exciting way.
Try it out here: https://ssss.tusitalabooks.com
1 ) Dream Storeys by Clara Chow
Published by Ethos Books (2016)
Audiobook: Storytel (2020)
E-book available here.
Synopsis:
What if you could dream up any building you like? What would it be? How would constructing it change our lives?
A shopping mall self-destructs, and a single mother vanishes. A tree house for orphans and old folks is torn apart by an act of mercy. The Singapore Flyer is reinvented as a political prison. In this collection of nine tales, Clara Chow examines an alternative Singaporean landscape—one that exists only on paper—and the people we might be in it. A former newspaper correspondent, she interviews nine architects about chimeric structures and sets short stories in them. A hybrid of journalism and fiction, Dream Storeys documents the voices of urban visionaries, while taking their ideas into inventive, evocative new territories.
2) Kappa Quartet by Daryl Qilim Yam
Published by Epigram Books (2016)
Audiobook: Storytel (2019)
E-book available here.
Synopsis:
Kevin is a young man without a soul, holidaying in Tokyo; Mr Five, the enigmatic kappa, is the man he so happens to meet. Little does Kevin know that kappas—the river demons of Japanese folklore—desire nothing more than the souls of other humans. Set between Singapore and Japan, Kappa Quartet is split into eight discrete sections, tracing the rippling effects of this chance encounter across a host of other characters, connected and bound to one another in ways both strange and serendipitous. Together they ask one another: what does it mean to be in possession of something nobody has seen before?
3) The Catherine Lim Collection by Catherine Lim
Published by Marshall Cavendish Cavendish Asia (2009)
Audiobook/E-book: Storytel (2019)
Synopsis:
This book consists of three celebrated short story collections and an early novel, each reflecting Lim's prowess as a storyteller chronicling a society in transit, where multiethnic characters struggle with their identities as the past and the present intersect, mingle and clash.
Featured publications:
- The Serpent's Tooth (1982)
- They Do Return… but gently lead them back (1983)
- O Singapore!: Stories in Celebration (1988)
- The Woman's Book of Superlatives (1993)
4) The Minorities by Suffian Hakim
Published by Epigram Books (2018)
Audiobook: Storytel (2019)
E-book available on Amazon or Google Play.
Synopsis:
Meet the four misfits living in one HDB flat.
One is a Malay–Jew who is trying to get his father to come back as a ghost. Cantona is a promising Bangladeshi artist on the run from a construction company. Tights is a Chinese illegal immigrant with a Forrest Gump obsession. And Shanti is a gifted Indian lab technician hiding from her abusive husband.
When a forlorn pontianak begins haunting them, the four friends find themselves embroiled in a surreal showdown that may just upend the world, or at least Singapore.
Written in Suffian Hakim's trademark humour, The Minorities is a novel about those living on the edges of society and their soulful bond.
#BuySingLit Working Committee
Singapore Book Council
National Arts Council
DDB Group Singapore