Born 1938
(Pseudonym: Ma Elangkannan) M Balakrishnan is a short story writer and novelist. He has published five collections of short stories and three novels. His work documents the lives of local Tamils from various levels of society, at different periods ranging from the British colonial period to the Japanese Occupation to more recent times. His work has been translated into English and Malay, and has been broadcast on radio and television. His works are set texts in schools and tertiary institutions in Singapore and India. M Balakrishnan received the SEA Write Award (1982), The Tamizhavel Award (1999), Singapore Literature Prize (2004) and the Cultural Medallion (2005).



(1935 – 2002) Gopal Baratham’s life spanned many of the key events in Singapore’s recent history – he grew up during the Japanese Occupation, began his medical education in the 50s and spent 25 years as a neurosurgeon in the UK, then Singapore. His remarkable achievements as a writer are paralleled by those as a surgeon – he is probably the only person who was elected president of the ASEAN Association of Neurosurgeons and awarded the S.E.A (South-East Asia) Write Award in the same year (1991).

Most of Baratham’s literary achievements occurred in the last years of his medical career. He had begun writing long before his first short story was published in 1974 in Commentary, a publication of the National University of Singapore Society. By the time his first and most controversial novel, A Candle or the Sun, was published in 1991 by a London publisher, he had already published stories in various literary journals, which subsequently appeared in two collections during the 1980s. Figments of Experience (later reissued as Love Letter and Other Stories), People Make You Cry and Memories that Glow in the Dark (1995) were reissued as a single volume entitled The City of Forgetting.


(1999 - ) Dennis Bloodworth was the first foreign correspondent for The Observer from 1949 – 1981. The cub reporter and sub-editor joined the British Army at the out break of World War Two, where she spent seven years on the country.

Dennis was also the author of seven books on the region: The Chinese Looking Glass, An Eye For the Dragon, Heirs Apparent (with his wife, Laing Ching Ping), The Chinese Machiavelli (with his wife), Married a Barbarian.

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow is the co-author of Singapore: A Biography (2009), an authoritative eyewitness history of Singapore. She has also written for Lonely Planet guidebooks about Vietnam (2008) and South Korea (2010). Born and raised in Singapore, she went to the United States to study English and history at Northwestern University. She is based in London (2010-2011) to pursue a master's degree in cultural studies at Goldsmiths, University of London.