Haresh Sharma at Writing the City

The October Writing the City will be a Playwriting Workshop with Haresh Sharma, presented by Writing the City and the NLB SG Author Series, and will take place on 21 Oct 2017 at 2pm at Toa Payoh Library.

Haresh Sharma has been the Resident Playwright of The Necessary Stage since 1990. He was awarded the Cultural Medallion in 2015. To date, he has written more than 100 plays which have been staged in over 20 cities. His play, Off Centre, was selected by the Ministry of Education as a Literature text for 'N' and 'O' Levels.

Haresh has 13 publications of his plays, including Trilogy, Shorts 1, Shorts 2 and Don't Forget to Remember Me. His works have been translated into Malay, Mandarin, Greek and Italian. He was awarded Best Original Script for Fundamentally Happy, Good People and Gemuk Girls at the 2007, 2008 and 2009 The Straits Times Life! Theatre Awards respectively.

He is the first non-American to be awarded the prestigious Goldberg Master Playwright by New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 2011.  In 2014, he was conferred the Southeast Asian Writers (or S.E.A. Write) Award (Singapore), which recognises and honours literary excellence in the ASEAN region.

Happy Birthday Darling

Happy Birthday to the best Wife and Mum in the whole universe & beyond.

Singapore Unbound Fellowship

"The goal of the Singapore Unbound Fellowship is to cultivate literary talent and encourage literary achievement by immersing a promising Singaporean author in the cultural life of New York City."

On 19 July at Artistry, the inaugural winner of the Fellowship was announced.

Congratulations to emerging playwright Nur Sabrina binte Dzulkifli. We were treated to the performance of a scene from her play "This is not a Draft".

It was lovely to hear some other emerging writers such as Teo Xiao Ting, one of the six poets chosen for the 2017 Sing Lit Station Poetry Manuscript Bootcamp, and Nuraliah Norasid, winner of the 2016 Epigram Books Fiction Prize for The Gatekeeper.

Larger images are here.

Pink Dot 2017 - Part Two

More images from Pink Dot 2017 here.

Pink Dot 2017 - Part One

Compare and contrast to Pink Dot in 2009.

Monyet

Please support the Jakarta Animal Aid Network and their campaign to end this cruel and inhumane practise. Please donate here.

"Long Tailed Macaques are extremely popluar in Indonesia as they are used as Dancing Monkeys, Topeng Monyet is what they are called in the Indonesian Language.
Therefore this project has a major focus on the Dancing monkeys. This extremely cruel practice is where juvenile Macaques are forced to perform (dance, ride bikes) in the loud and very crowded busy streets of Jakarta. An illegal trade in wild Macaques has built up around this phenomena known as ‘Topeng Monyet’.

JAAN observed a worrying increase in the use of these monkeys on Jakarta streets since 2009 and has started to campaign against this abuse ever since."

Pink Dot 2009

In 2009 cowboy hats and bunny ears were in. There was a lot more space too.

Sing Lit Station Prose Bootcamp June 2017

At the end of 2016, Sing Lit Station held its first Prose Bootcamp with Clarissa Goenawan, Ng Yi-Sheng, Toh Hsien Men and Teoh Ren Jie, and a cast of writers, publishers, agents, academics and editors.

In June 2017 Krishna, Daryl and I regrouped with the Clarissa, Yi-Sheng and Hsien Minh and spent a very pleasant Saturday afternoon going through their manuscripts.

Here are some of the images.