Speakers and Moderators


Find out more about our speakers this year by navigating the tabs below!


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A.K. Kulshreshth
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A.K. Kulshreshth

A.K. Kulshreshth’s short stories are published in eight countries, in litmags including Asia Literary Review and Wasafiri. He has co-translated several Hindi works into English. These include Chitralekha (The Dancer, Her Lover, and the Yogi) and Vaishali Ki Nagarvadhu (Bride of the City, shortlisted for the SLP Translation category this year). His first novel, Lying Eyes, was longlisted for the Epigram Books Fiction Prize.

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Amanda Ruiqing Flynn
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Amanda Ruiqing Flynn

Amanda Ruiqing Flynn is a visual artist, writer, literary translator, editor and educator who grew up in the United Kingdom, resided in Taiwan, and has now returned to Singapore, her birthplace. Her stories, essays and poetry can be found in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Alluvium, This is Southeast Asia and forthcoming in Eunoia Review. She translates Taiwan Literature Award excerpts for National Taiwan Museum of Literature, and has worked with National Taiwan Museum and Hualien County Government. She was a judge of the 8th Bai Meigui Translation Competition and co-editor of Singapore in the Eyes of Mother Artists. She graduated with a BA (1st) in Chinese and Development Studies from SOAS, University of London and an MFA (dist.) in Art and Design from National Donghwa University under the Taiwan Scholarship Programme. On most days, she is chief storyteller to her three-year-old son.

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Chan Maw Woh
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Chan Maw Woh

Chan Maw Woh Chan Maw Woh has 17 dictionaries jointly authored with Yang Quee Yee, in various combinations of Malay, Chinese and English, topped with 17 Chinese books written or translated from Malay. She has continued lending her expertise to various translation projects. Over 35 years she worked with major Chinese newspapers, Sin Chew Jit Poh and Lianhe Zaobao, translating Malaysian and Indonesian newspaper editorials into Chinese, beside writing numerous essays on Malay cultures and societies in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. An active member of various writers’ clubs, Chan has been conferred lifetime membership with Angkatan Sasterawan '50 (ASAS '50) and awarded the Malay Literary Prize, as well as the Malay Language Council of Singapore's Friends of Literature Prize.

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Haresh Sharma
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Haresh Sharma

 Haresh is the Resident Playwright of The Necessary Stage (TNS) since 1990, having written more than 100 plays staged in over 20 cities. His play, Off Centre, was the first Singapore play selected by the Ministry of Education for GCE N- and O-Levels. He was conferred the S.E.A. Write Award (2014) and the Cultural Medallion (2015). Haresh has 13 publications of his plays, with works translated into Malay, Mandarin, Greek and Italian. Most recently in 2021, Haresh published Reading the Room: A Playwright’s Devising Journey, which details his devising process developed over his career at TNS. He was awarded Best Original Script for Fundamentally Happy, Good People and Gemuk Girls at The Straits Times Life Theatre Awards. Haresh also had the honour of having his works featured at Esplanade’s first playwright-centred season at The Studios in 2017.

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Hemang Yadav
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Hemang Yadav

Playwright Hemang Nandabalan Yadav’s works include Radio for the Singapore Arts Festival Fringe (2008), a modern Noh play All the Crazy People (2010), Maya: Demon Architect for the Esplanade Raga Festival (2014), site-specific plays for Art Walk Little India (2017 – 2020), a trilingual ten-minute play Pongal (2021), and Death of An Artist, uniting drama, dance and poetry (2021 and 2022). Hemang has been transcreating the works of Kalidasa, Tagore and more recently Chekhov, whose short stories he adapted into short plays and whose play The Marriage Proposal he adapted into Hyderabadi Urdu context.

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Michael Lim Sze How
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Michael Lim Sze How

Michael Lim Sze How was principally an educator. He closed his school chapter as Principal of The Seventh-day Adventist School, not before a two-year foray into the printing industry. Now retired, he spends his time with regular walks to keep fit, besides learning to use IT gadgets and software. With great effort, as he does not read Chinese but has spoken fluency in the language, Michael put his mind to stimulating work such as the transcreation of this title, Tapping Words, Bridging Cultures.

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Ng Yi-Sheng
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Ng Yi-Sheng

Ng Yi-Sheng is a Singaporean writer, researcher and activist. He was the translator of Cultural Medallion recipient Wong Yoon Wah’s poetry collections The New Village/《新村》 and Homecomings/《重返诗钞》. His books include the short story collection Lion City and the poetry collection last boy (both winners of the Singapore Literature Prize), and he served as editor of A Mosque in the Jungle: Classic Ghost Stories by Othman Wok and the multilingual queer anthologies GASPP and EXHALE.

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Saleem Hadi
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Saleem Hadi

Saleem Hadi is an award-winning hybrid visual-storyteller who uses theatre and film to shed light on national narratives and social issues. He is also a bilingual (Tamil & English) writer who writes scripts (tv/theatre/films), poems and short stories. Saleem had been contributing heavily to Singapore’s arts and media industry since 1999. Saleem had written, directed and produced more than 25 plays (both in English and Tamil) and 25 short films, some of which had won and were featured in international festivals. Saleem won the 1st Prize for his English short story in NAC’s prestigious 2017 Golden Point Award Literary Competition.

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Shelly Bryant
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Shelly Bryant

Shelly Bryant divides her year between Shanghai and Singapore, working as a poet, writer, and translator. She is a published author and has translated work from the Chinese for Penguin Books, Epigram Publishing, the National Library Board in Singapore, Giramondo Books, HSRC, and Rinchen Books, and edited poetry anthologies for Alban Lake and Celestial Books. Her translation of Sheng Keyi’s Northern Girls was long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012, and her translation of You Jin's In Time, Out of Place was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize in 2016.

 

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Uganda Kwan
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Uganda Kwan

Dr Uganda Kwan is the Director of the Master of Arts in Translation and Interpretation programme at NTU and associate professor at the NTU School of Humanities. She has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, Princeton University, and the University of Cambridge, the latter through a scholarship at the Needham Research Institute. Her book Interpreters as Scholars (譯者與學者) was awarded a book prize in Hong Kong. Her work has appeared in journals and a digest of translation studies, including the Bulletin of the Institute of Modern History, Journal of Translation Studies, and the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, among others.

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Chan Wai Han
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Chan Wai Han

Chan Wai Han (Moderator), a Social Work graduate, edits and produces books for Pagesetters Services. (An irony indeed, considering that she dreaded writing compositions during school days!) She enjoys composing Chinese blessing poems for friends with their names, and working on issues of social conscience. She still dreams of becoming proficient in Bahasa Kebangsaan, our National Language.