Agnes Chew

Agnes Chew is the author of the fiction collection, Eternal Summer of My Homeland (2023), which was longlisted for The Asian Prize for Fiction, shortlisted for the POPULAR Readers’ Choice Award, and a national bestseller in Singapore; and the essay collection, The Desire for Elsewhere (2016). Her fiction has won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Asia), and has been published or is forthcoming in Granta, Necessary Fiction, and Best New Singaporean Short Stories, among others. A 2025 Fall Resident of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, she has received scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Tin House, Granta Writers' Workshop, and more. She is currently working on her first novel, which was longlisted fo

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Vrushali Junnarkar

Vrushali Junnarkar is a dentist by training. When not practising, teaching or researching in dentistry, she contributes opinion pieces to women’s empowerment website womensweb and writes for the Times of India on various aspects of living abroad as an Indian. She has also been published in What We Inherit: Growing Up Indian (2022). Her first novel, The Campbell Gardens Ladies’ Swimming Class, won the 2023 Epigram Books Fiction Prize.
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Wong Souk Yee

Wong Souk Yee, 57, is a playwright and former political detainee, who contested the 2015 General Election as a member of the Singapore Democratic Party. An adjunct lecturer at the National University of Singapore, she co-founded the now-defunct theatre group Third Stage. In 1987, she was detained for allegedly taking part in a Marxist conspiracy against the government. She co-directed and co-wrote the play Square Moon, staged in 2013, about detention without trial.

Wong holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of New South Wales, Sydney; a Master of Arts (Honours) in Creative Writing from the University of Western Sydney; and a Bachelor of Accountancy from the then University of Singapore.
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Rainer Maria Rilke

A mystic lyricism and precise imagery often marked verse of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose collections profoundly influenced 20th-century German literature and include The Book of Hours (1905) and The Duino Elegies (1923).

People consider him of the greatest 20th century users of the language.

His haunting images tend to focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety — themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.

His two most famous sequences include the Sonnets to Orpheus , and his most famous prose works include the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malt
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Banana Yoshimoto

Banana Yoshimoto (よしもとばなな or 吉本ばなな) is the pen name of Mahoko Yoshimoto (吉本真秀子), a Japanese contemporary writer. She writes her name in hiragana. (See also 吉本芭娜娜 (Chinese).)

Along with having a famous father, poet Takaaki Yoshimoto, Banana's sister, Haruno Yoiko, is a well-known cartoonist in Japan. Growing up in a liberal family, she learned the value of independence from a young age.

She graduated from Nihon University's Art College, majoring in Literature. During that time, she took the pseudonym "Banana" after her love of banana flowers, a name she recognizes as both "cute" and "purposefully androgynous."

Despite her success, Yoshimoto remains a down-to-earth and obscure figure. Whenever she appears in public she eschews make-up and dre
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Yōko Ogawa

Yōko Ogawa (小川洋子) was born in Okayama, Okayama Prefecture, graduated from Waseda University, and lives in Ashiya. Since 1988, she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Her novel The Professor and his Beloved Equation has been made into a movie. In 2006 she co-authored „An Introduction to the World's Most Elegant Mathematics“ with Masahiko Fujiwara, a mathematician, as a dialogue on the extraordinary beauty of numbers.

A film in French, "L'Annulaire“ (The Ringfinger), directed by Diane Bertrand, starring Olga Kurylenko and Marc Barbé, was released in France in June 2005 and subsequently made the rounds of the international film festivals; the film, some of which is filmed in the Hamburg docks, is based in part on Og
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Sara Gran

Sara Gran's most recent book is LITTLE MYSTERIES, available from Dreamland Books on 2/11/25. She is the author of 7 1/2 previous novels, a screenwriter, and a publisher.
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Annie Ernaux

The author of some twenty works of fiction and memoir, Annie Ernaux is considered by many to be France’s most important writer. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She has also won the Prix Renaudot for A Man's Place and the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her body of work. More recently she received the International Strega Prize, the Prix Formentor, the French-American Translation Prize, and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for The Years, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2019. Her other works include Exteriors, A Girl's Story, A Woman's Story, The Possession, Simple Passion, Happening, I Remain in Darkness, Shame, A Frozen Woman, and A Man's Place.
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Keigo Higashino

Associated Names:
* Keigo Higashino
* 東野圭吾 (Japanese)
* 東野圭吾 (Traditional Chinese)
* ฮิงาชิโนะ เคโงะ (Thai)

Keigo Higashino (東野圭吾) is one of the most popular and biggest selling fiction authors in Japan—as well known as James Patterson, Dean Koontz or Tom Clancy are in the USA.

Born in Osaka, he started writing novels while still working as an engineer at Nippon Denso Co.　(presently DENSO). He won the Edogawa Rampo Prize, which is awarded annually to the finest mystery work, in 1985 for the novel Hōkago (After School) at age 27. Subsequently, he quit his job and started a career as a writer in Tokyo.

In 1999, he won the Mystery Writers of Japan Inc award for the novel Himitsu (The Secret), which was translated into English by Kerim Yasar and pu
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Haresh Sharma

Haresh is Resident Playwright of The Necessary Stage and co-Artistic Director of the annual M1 Singapore Fringe Festival. To date, he has written more than 100 plays. His play, Off Centre, was selected by the Ministry of Education as a Literature text for N and O Levels, and republished by The Necessary Stage in 2006. In 2008, Ethos Books published Interlogue: Studies in Singapore Literature, Vol. 6, written by Prof David Birch and edited by A/P Kirpal Singh, which presented an extensive investigation of Haresh's work over the past 20 years. A collection of Haresh’s plays have been translated into Mandarin and published by Global Publishing with the title '哈里斯·沙玛剧作选'.

Haresh was awarded Best Original Script for Fundamentally Happy, Good Peop
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Sarah Rose Etter

Sarah Rose Etter is the author of Tongue Party, and The Book of X, winner of a Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel. Her second novel, RIPE, is forthcoming from Scribner in July 2023.

Her work has appeared in Time, Guernica, BOMB, The Bennington Review, The Cut, VICE, and elsewhere. She has been awarded residences at the Jack Kerouac House, the Disquiet International program in Portugal, and the Gullkistan Writing Residency in Iceland.

She earned her BA in English from Pennsylvania State University and her MFA in fiction from Rosemont College. She lives in Los Angeles. For more info, visit SarahRoseEtter.com.
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Kenji Ueda

Kenji Ueda is a Japanese novelist known for blending fantasy with the charm of everyday life. Born in Tokyo in 1969, he made his debut as a writer in 2021 with Teppan (The Iron Griddle), the revised version of a work he wrote in 2019 for the 1st Japan Delicious Fiction Award.
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Jeremy Tiang

Jeremy Tiang is the author of State of Emergency (2017, finalist for the 2016 Epigram Books Fiction Prize) and It Never Rains on National Day (2015, shortlisted for the 2016 Singapore Literature Prize). He won the Golden Point Award for Fiction in 2009 for his story "Trondheim". He also writes and translates plays, including A Dream of Red Pavilions, The Last Days of Limehouse, A Son Soon by Xu Nuo, and Floating Bones by Quah Sy Ren and Han Lao Da. Tiang has translated more than ten books from the Chinese—including novels by Chan Ho-Kei, Zhang Yueran, Yeng Pway Ngon and Su Wei-chen—and has received an NEA Literary Translation Fellowship, a PEN/Heim Translation Grant, and a People’s Literature Award Mao-Tai Cup. He currently lives in Brookly
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Amanda Lee Koe

Born and raised in Singapore, Amanda Lee Koe has lived in Beijing, Berlin and Bangkok and is now based in New York.

She was the youngest winner of the Singapore Literature Prize for the short story collection Ministry of Moral Panic (Epigram, 2014), shortlisted for the Frankfurt Book Fair's LiBeraturpreis and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt's International Literature Prize.

Her debut novel, Delayed Rays of A Star (Doubleday, 2019), won the Henfield Prize, awarded to the best work of fiction by an MFA candidate at Columbia University's School of the Arts. It was a Straits Times #1 Bestseller, and an NPR Best Book of the Year.

Her second novel, Sister Snake (Ecco, 2024), was a Gold House Book Club pick, a RuPaul’s Allstora Sapphic Book Club se
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Jemimah Wei

Author of The Original Daughter, forthcoming Spring 2025 from Doubleday Books (US) and Weidenfeld & Nicolson (UK).
Reader of Literally Everything.

This is the reason I need glasses.
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Sayaka Murata

Sayaka Murata (in Japanese, 村田沙耶香) is one of the most exciting up-and-coming writers in Japan today.
She herself still works part time in a convenience store, which gave her the inspiration to write Convenience Store Woman (Konbini Ningen). She debuted in 2003 with Junyu (Breastfeeding), which won the Gunzo Prize for new writers. In 2009 she won the Noma Prize for New Writers with Gin iro no uta (Silver Song), and in 2013 the Mishima Yukio Prize for Shiro-oro no machi no, sono hone no taion no (Of Bones, of Body Heat, of Whitening City). Convenience Store Woman won the 2016 Akutagawa Award. Murata has two short stories published in English (both translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori): "Lover on the Breeze" (Ruptured Fiction(s) of the Earthqu
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Wong Souk Yee

Wong Souk Yee, 57, is a playwright and former political detainee, who contested the 2015 General Election as a member of the Singapore Democratic Party. An adjunct lecturer at the National University of Singapore, she co-founded the now-defunct theatre group Third Stage. In 1987, she was detained for allegedly taking part in a Marxist conspiracy against the government. She co-directed and co-wrote the play Square Moon, staged in 2013, about detention without trial.

Wong holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of New South Wales, Sydney; a Master of Arts (Honours) in Creative Writing from the University of Western Sydney; and a Bachelor of Accountancy from the then University of Singapore.
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Ling Ma

Ling Ma is a writer hailing from Fujian, Utah, and Kansas. She is author of the novel SEVERANCE, and the story collection BLISS MONTAGE. She lives in Chicago with her family.
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Ashley Chan

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Ng Ziqin

Ng Ziqin is an undergraduate law student at the National University of Singapore. Her writing has been featured in RICE and Asia Law Network. In 2020, she placed third in a youth op-ed competition with her piece, “We Need to Stop Promoting Science as the Default JC Stream.” Her biggest literary heroes are Terry Pratchett and Adrian Tan, and she has a growing taste for mystery novels and psychological thrillers. One day, Ziqin hopes to achieve her lifelong dream of retiring in a cave house, where she will write whodunits that take place in Yishun. Every School a Good School is her first novel.
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Nisha Mehraj

Nisha Mehraj left full-time teaching and became a private tutor so she could pursue writing. The only home she has ever known is Singapore, yet she lives vicariously through her characters and escapes into the safety of the worlds she creates. The many strong women she has met and read about, and her own grandmother’s determination to raise her three daughters as independent thinking women, taught her to have ambitions and gave her the courage to dream. Her short story “Chai” was published in Mascara Literary Review in 2012. We Do Not Make Love Here is her first novel.
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Karina Robles Bahrin

Karina Robles Bahrin got her first break as a writer when she guest edited a weekly teen column in The New Straits Times a very long time ago. Her short fiction has been published in venues such as Urban Odysseys: KL Stories, KL Noir: Blue, A Subtle Degree of Restraint & Other Stories and Malaysian Tales: Retold & Remixed. She is a former columnist with The Heat, a weekly by Focus Malaysia. She currently lives and works on the island of Langkawi, Malaysia. The Accidental Malay is her first novel.
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Uketsu

Associated Names:
* Uketsu
* 雨穴
* อุเก็ตสึ (Thai Profile)
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Vrushali Junnarkar

Vrushali Junnarkar is a dentist by training. When not practising, teaching or researching in dentistry, she contributes opinion pieces to women’s empowerment website womensweb and writes for the Times of India on various aspects of living abroad as an Indian. She has also been published in What We Inherit: Growing Up Indian (2022). Her first novel, The Campbell Gardens Ladies’ Swimming Class, won the 2023 Epigram Books Fiction Prize.
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Hwang Bo-Reum

Hwang Bo-reum studied Computer Science and worked as a software engineer. She wrote several essay collections: I Read Every Day, I Tried Kickboxing for the First Time and This Distance is Perfect. Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop is her first novel, which has sold over 150,000 copies in Korea and been sold into 9 territories. Before its release as a paperback, the novel was initially published as an e-book after winning an open contest co-organised by Korean content-publishing platform ‘Brunch’.

대학에서 컴퓨터공학을 전공하고 LG전자에서 소프트웨어 개발자로 일했다. 몇 번의 입사와 퇴사를 반복하면서도 매일 읽고 쓰는 사람으로서의 정체성은 잃지 않고 있다. 지은 책으로 『매일 읽겠습니다』, 『난생처음 킥복싱』, 『이 정도 거리가 딱 좋다』가 있다.

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Yun Jung-eun

Yun Jung-eun is the author of more than ten books, including Live the Way You Want, Even If I Don't Know How to Be an Adult and To Travel or to Love. She believes that writing is self-reflection, a close examination of emotions; to write is to connect.

Yun hosts the podcast The Path of Books with Jungeun Yun. Her debut novel, Marigold Mind Laundry, has been a top-five bestseller in Korea, and is now available in English translation. She lives in Korea.

Associated Names:
* 윤정은 (Korean)
* Yun Jung-eun (English)
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Nisha Mehraj

Nisha Mehraj left full-time teaching and became a private tutor so she could pursue writing. The only home she has ever known is Singapore, yet she lives vicariously through her characters and escapes into the safety of the worlds she creates. The many strong women she has met and read about, and her own grandmother’s determination to raise her three daughters as independent thinking women, taught her to have ambitions and gave her the courage to dream. Her short story “Chai” was published in Mascara Literary Review in 2012. We Do Not Make Love Here is her first novel.
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