Once upon a time, Jaclyn Chan’s career in investment banking was flourishing. She was one of the top-rated analysts at her group in New York. She even got to fly with her clients on their private jets. Jaclyn was, as they say, on the fast track, so she did the next most obvious thing. She quit...to write sitcoms. Jaclyn has since made inroads into the television industry in Singapore. Now, she’s set her sights on the wonderful world of children’s books. They seem to have higher standards. Her first book The Adventures Of Lofty De Lizzard is one of the 14 books under the First-Time Writers & Illustrators Publishing Initiative Jointly organised by the National Book Development Council of Singapore and the Media Development Authority.


Born 1942
Of Indian –Swiss parentage, Chand was born and educated in London, where she studied textile design at St Martin s School of Art. In 1962, she left England for Japan, where she lived and worked (except for five years in Bombay) until 1997, when she moved to Singapore.

She is the author of seven novels. The Gossamer Fly (1980), The Bonsai Tree (1983), Last Quadrant, (1985), and The Painted Cage (1986) are all set in Japan, whereas the war novel, A choice of Evils (1996), is set in China and Japan. House of the Sun (1989) and A Far Horizon (2001) are set in India. House was the first Asian play with an all-Asian cast and direction when it was adapted for the British stage in 1990.

Chand was Visiting Fellow at Mansfield College, Oxford, in 2004. Her eighth novel is due to be published in 2008.


Born in 1982
(Pseudonym: Han Han) Chen is a writer and a graduate of the Nanyang Technological University’s School of Communication and Information. She is presently working in the media and IT industry. She was one of the commissioned columnists of Friday Weekly from 1998 to 2000. Her published works include a prose collection, The Other Side of the Rainbow, and a short story collection, 7-Eleven Fantasy. The latter was on the booklist of the National Library Board’s READ! Singapore Campaign. In 2006, she published her second novel, Saving the Icon.


Born 1965
Cheong majored in English Literature and Linguistics in NUS, and was a journalist before he became a junior college teacher. He has written five novels and a novella. In his fiction, the youthful yearning for love and happiness is often met with unrequited love or tragic death, and marriage denied as a source of happiness. Largely autobiographical, The Stolen Child (1989) took eight years to write. Poets, Priests and Prostitutes: A Rock Fairytale (1990) evokes the tragedy of romantic love. The 18 stories in Life Cycle of Homo Sapiens, Male (1992) chronicle life. The novella seventeen (1996) is a ghost story. Tangerine (1997), set in Vietnam, won the 1996 Singapore Literature Prize, and the confessional monologue, The Man in the Cupboard (1999), was a Merit Award winner in the Singapore Literature Prize. Cheong s only work of poetry, Void Decks and Other Empty Places (1996), was Commendation Award Winner in the 1995 Singapore Literature Prize.


Born 1965
Cheong is a poet, freelance writer and adjunct lecturer in Creative Writing. He won the NAC s Young Artist Award in 2000. He has an MFA from the University of Queensland.

Cheong has published three volumes of poetry. Temptation and Other Poems (1998) draws on religion (Cheong is a lapsed Catholic), carnal love, and the art of poetry. I watch the stars go out (1999) provides a wider poetic range in a larger number of poems. Broken by the Rain (2003), which title is from Dante’s Inferno, is the most powerful volume, and uses male and female voices in gritty, dramatic monologues. Cheong has stopped writing poetry for the time being and instead has written two novels for children: The Call from Crying House (2006) and its sequel, The Woman in the Last Carriage (2007). Cheong edited idea to ideal: 12 Singapore poets on the writing of their poems (2004).


Chew Kok Chang is a versatile writer, known by his pen name Zhou Can. His writing career began when he was 16 and his first collection of poems, The Dream of a Child, was published in 1953. Author of nine collections of poems and 12 of prose and short stories, he has published works such as It is Raining Outside the Door, A Sky of Kites, and Butterfly Catcher.


Shirley Chew is Professor of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Leeds. She was the co-editor of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (1992-6), guest editor of Kunapipi: Journal of Postcolonial Writing (1997-9) and is general editor of the journal Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings.

She is co-editor of the book Unbecoming Daughters of the Empire (1993), which includes her own essay on the cross-cultural influences of an English education and a Chinese upbringing, and of Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics (1999). Her essay '(Post)colonial Translation in V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival' was published in Re-constructing The Book: Literary Texts in Transmission (2001). Shirley Chew is currently working on A History of Postcolonial Commonwealth Literature 1947-2000 and a study of the novelist Anita Desai.


Debbie Chia is a first-class honours graduate in Cultural Studies from the University of Melbourne. She has been published in the2ndrule, JUICE and HerStory, a compendium of essays published by the Singapore Council of Women's Organisations. She is a full-time writer and part-time DJ. Her favourite authors are Walter Benjamin, D.H. Lawrence and Charles Bukowski.


Felix Chia, a versatile writer has produced numerous Publications including The Babas, 1980, which was awarded the highly commended NBDCS Book Awards for Non-Fiction 1982; The Babas Revisited, 1994; The Lady in Red and Her Companions, 1984 and a play Mari Kita Main Wayang (Let's Stage a Show), 1994.


Grace Chia was born in 1973 in Singapore. She graduated from the National University of Singapore with double majors in English Literature and Theatre Studies in 1997. She wrote extensively for publications such as BigO, The Ridge (campus newspaper of the NUS) and The Peak, before publishing her first poetry collection, womango, in Sept 1998. Currently living in London, she is looking for the literary agent who will help launch her career on an international scale.


Born in 1931.
Chia Hearn Chek writes primarily for children. He has retold folktales in the Moongate Collection with artwork by Kwan Shan Mei.


Born in 1957
Chia Hwee Pheng writes under the pseudonym Xi Ni Er (希尼尔). He has twice received the First Prize Award of the "Golden Lion Literary Awards" (1982 & 1993), the Book Awards from The National Book Development Council of Singapore (NBDCS) (1990 & 1994). His works include "Kidnapping Times" and "The Stretched Credulity" (poetry), "The Unbearable Heaviness of Life", "The Earnest Mask" and "The Collection of Xi Ni Er Mini-Fiction" (mini fiction). He is currently the President of Singapore Association of Writers.


Born in 1959
In 1993, Chia Joo Ming was presented with the "Young Artist" award for Literature by the National Arts Council of Singapore. He was also invited to participate in the International Writing Project in 1995. His novel "Return" (1999) was made into a television drama series while his short stories compilation "A New Language" won the 1996 Singapore Book Prize. In 2006, his compilation "Reconstructing Nanyang" won the Singapore Literature Prize. Chia is currently a Deputy Head at Lianhe Zaobao.


Josephine Chia had worked as an Assistant Dental Nurse for 7 years, before enrolling in a university to read English and Philosophy. Isn’t Singapore Somewhere In China, Luv? is her first collection of short stories.

Josephine’s break into the UK publishing world came when she was one of the winners of the 1992 Ian St. James Award for short fiction. Her short story, Tropical Fever, can be found in an anthology Blood, Sweat and Tears published by Harper Collins. Another short story, Watercolour Dream won a prize in the Guildford Book Festival.

She has also published a cookery book, Rasa Singapura/Taste Of Singapore, her memoirs, Frog Under A Coconut Shell and a book about Yoga, Body and Mind Sculpture. Her book, Shadows across the Sun, a poignant tale about mothers, was published in September 2005 by a US publisher, Publish America.


Michael Chiang is widely acknowledged as Singapore’s most popular playwright, due to the many hit comedies that he has written. His playwriting career began with a 30-minute play, Beauty Box, which was commissioned for the 1984 Singapore Festival of Arts. It broke new ground in its liberal use of Singlish, though the play also hinged on stereotypes to milk the laughs.

In 1985, Chiang published a humour book on national service called Army Daze, which became an instant bestseller. It was later adapted to a full-length play in 1987 and made into a movie in 1996. In 1988, Chiang and composer Dick Lee were commissioned to write a musical for the Singapore Arts Festival - Beauty World – which was played to full houses. In 1992, a new production toured Japan for three weeks at the invitation of the Japan Cultural Foundation. In the same year, Chiang again broke new ground with Private Parts, a ‘serious comedy’ about a popular TV star whose life turns upside down after he meets three patients in a sex-change clinic.


Chiu Liu Chian is one of the winners of the National Book Development Council of Singapore Book Awards in 1982. He is a poet and a literary critic, and owes much of his success to his education in the then University of Singapore, where he studied western literature and philosophy which he now regards as important in refining his literary writing techniques.

Chiu believes that writers need to be bilingual themselves in order to keep in step with new social developments. He argues that if Chinese writers are bilingual and would widen their scope of writing, there should be no danger of a falling readership.


Born in 1958
Chua is a poet, writer and academic. He was formerly the Sub-Dean of the Arts and Social Sciences Cluster in the National Institute of Education, and is currently the Head for Chinese Language Learning Technologies Research lab. He was also on the panel of judges of the SEA Write Award and the Singapore Cultural Medallion. His published works include a collection of contemporary poetry The Moon Is The Traditional Lamp, a collection of essays on the performing arts, The Stage in Two Volumes, as well as a collection of children’s poetry and nursery rhymes Little Ting Ting, Oh Little Ting Ting.


Writer. Born 1970, Malaysia in 1970, education in Singapore since the age of 10, graduated with an Electrical Engineering and Computer Science degree at the University of California at Berkeley. Contributes occasionally to BigO magazine and writes screenplays in his free time.

Publication
Gone Case, SNP, 1997

Prizes and awards
1996 Commended, Singapore Literature Prize for Gone Case
1995 NAC-SPH Golden Point Award (joint winner)


Rebecca Chua has a first collection of short stories: The Newspaper Editor and Other Stories (1981). Her stories have appeared in The Asia Magazine and in The Sun In Her Eyes, a selection of short stories of Singapore authors edited by Geraldine Heng. In 1977, the BBC broadcast one of her stories. Four of her stories are also found in Singapore short stories I and II.


Born in 1974, Effie Chuang graduated from the University of Leeds with a LLB (Honours) in 1996. She started writing seriously in 1996 when she returned from UK. She cites Jean Genet, Pirandello, Ionesco, Fernando Arrabal as her influences.

Publication
Underground and Other Stories