Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  Singapore Unbound is pleased to announce three awards for the best undergraduate critical essays on Singapore and other literatures this year. Each winner receives USD250 and publication in our journal  SUSPECT . The awards are generously funded by Professor Koh Tai Ann (Nanyang Technological University) We're grateful to literary scholar Weihsin Gui (University of California, Riverside) for reading the submissions and making the selection. He gives his comments below, first on all the submissions and then on the individual winners.  “The essays submitted for this award are all to be commended for the depth of their textual analyses and the breadth of their engagement with various cultural and literary theories. I can envision all eight essays, after undergoing peer review and varying degrees of revision and expansion, being published in academic journals. I encourage the authors to consider doing...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . The Singapore Literature Prize is the top literary award in the country. The 2020 shortlist has just been announced and the category of poetry in English rightly includes the debuts of two bright young stars who have dared to craft highly experimental and yet totally absorbing books. Our SP Blog reviewer concludes that "In parsetreeforestfire Hamid Roslan has constructed an ingenious collection out of a melange of Singaporean languages." In a separate review of Marylyn Tan's Gaze Back , its reviewer enthuses that "This is a poetic collection told from the voice of the goat, from the eye on that spit, that has already been in the flames and now is going to de-code that experience for you." All the stranger then that the shortlist also includes the latest tired poetic offerings of Singapore's unofficial "poet laureate." Padded out by what the publisher calls ...