Worth Traveling For

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here.

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the Year of the Metal Rat brings some good news. In response to the cancellation of Alfian Sa'at's "Dialogue and Dissent" class by Yale-NUS last year, Yale University's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Senate passed a resolution recommending "the establishment of clear criteria and procedure" to handle such episodes involving free speech and academic independence. Singapore Unbound supports the recommendation wholeheartedly, but we are disappointed that the Senate "did not express explicit regret that, due in no small measure to this flawed institutional process, the victim Alfian Sa’at was publicly pilloried, including in [the Singaporean] parliament by the minister of education," as Linda Lim, Yale alumna and professor emerita at the University of Michigan, was quoted in the Times Higher Education.

You may have heard that Gaudy Boy's author Lawrence Lacambra Ypil has just been longlisted for The Believer Book Awards 2020. The Experiment of the Tropics is one of only 12 titles selected by the editors in the poetry category. The short list and winners will be announced in April/May, and the winners will read at the 2020 Believer Festival in Las Vegas. We wish Larry all the very best.

This year, in October, we will be organizing the 4th biennial Singapore Literature Festival in NYC, so we are especially pleased to find out that the festival has been named one of "8 Literature Festivals Worth Travelling For" by Ezvid Wiki. An honor to be included with the famous festivals at Jaipur, India, and Durham, UK. Founded in 2011, Ezvid Wiki was the world's first video wiki, and is now among the top 3,000 websites in the United States. Big thanks to past festival participants, supporters, and volunteers for putting the Sing Lit Fest in NYC on the map.

Singapore Unbound is offering two fellowships to Southeast Asia for promising younger writers from Singapore. See details here. The deadline for applications is March 31, 2020. Invest in us so that we can invest in writers, literature, and human rights.

Jee Leong Koh
January 30, 2020

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