Singapore Writing Retreat through Authors at Large
What are you doing on June 25th?
I lived in Singapore for nearly six years and was one of the inaugural faculty of Yale-NUS College, a collaboration between Yale and the National University of Singapore, and the first liberal arts college in Singapore’s history. My family and I fell in love with Singapore for so many reasons. When I think of this refined city-state at the tip of the Malay peninsula, I remember first and foremost the delicious food on offer. Scattered throughout the country are over a hundred “hawker centers,” collections of food stalls that serve inexpensive but delicious food from the array of cultures that make up Singapore’s people of mainly Chinese, Malay, and Indian backgrounds. The city is perhaps the cleanest and safest city in the world and is kept beautiful, too - a certain amount of greenery is incorporated into all new construction, plant life cascading down the edifices of buildings with rooftop parks, and a skyline that can compete with most world capitols for iconic architecture.
So Singapore seemed like a natural place for my friend Xu Xi and I to hold a writing retreat through our company, Authors at Large. We’ve been bringing writers through AAL (AALauthors.com) for a number of years to such locales as Iceland, Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Greece. Our Singapore retreat will be held June 25th-July 2nd. Xu Xi and I will be co-teaching a nonfiction workshop there, Booker finalist Madeleine Thien will be holding a fiction workshop, and Alvin Pang will be offering a poetry workshop. In addition, we’re pleased to be joined by special guest Lisa Lucas, Sr. VP & Publisher of Pantheon Schocken Books, Penguin Random House, USA. Besides the workshops, we will be offering salons and readings by our authors as well as by an esteemed group of internationally known Singaporean writers, including Noelle De Jesus, Jee Leong Koh, Inez Tan, and Darryl Qilin Yam. Our main venue will be the Arts House, an almost 200-year-old stately building that once housed Singapore’s first parliament.
We purposefully keep our retreats small and intimate, but we still have a few spots available. If you’re interested and would like to know more, you can email me at Robinhemley@gmail.com and/or visit AAL’s webpage: https://www.aalauthors.com/singapore-2023