“By mirroring real-life architectural dreams with a fictional narrative, Clara Chow has produced an intriguing and original literary structure. Her somewhat dystopian world is a discomforting vision of a future where people struggle to adapt to societies very different from today, yet are still guided by a deep sense of their own humanity and their connection to each other.”
From literary fiction to middle-grade series, Singapore’s new literary voices are getting louder, and their works finding new homes far away from the tropical city-state. Whether it is a true story, an anthology, or a poetry collection, the works are often about human nature and predicament.
Here, in alphabetical order, are 12 contemporary voices (and their best or latest works) that will strike a chord with readers, local and overseas.
Clara Chow: “Dream Storeys”
A collection of stories based on buildings that Singapore architects dream of, “Dream Storeys” is a hybrid of journalism and fiction that juxtaposes interviews with the city-state’s urban visionaries with tales that grow out of those conversations. Tales about a single mother in a self-destructing shopping mall, an orphanage-cum-nursing home in a tree house, political prisoners escaping a revolving jail, for instance, explore an alternative Singaporean landscape on paper and the people who might have lived in it.
Chow, a journalist with Singapore’s main newspaper, The Straits Times, has contributed short stories to various anthologies and journals, including Asia Literary Review, Blunderbuss magazine, Singapore Quarterly Literary Review, Cheat River River, and Stockholm Review of Literature.
