Yale-NUS faculty, students, and alumni featured at the Singapore Writers Festival 2023
Talks, readings, and panels presented by Yale-NUS community
The annual Singapore Writers Festival (SWF) returned this year with an exciting line-up of talks, events, and panels, held from 17 to 26 November. As a cornerstone of Asia’s literary scene, SWF is a significant cultural event, introducing Singaporeans to global literary luminaries while spotlighting regional creative talent. Through the years, SWF has grown into a dynamic convergence of writers, academics, and thinkers, featuring diverse activities such as panel discussions, workshops, lectures, and performances spanning ten days. This year’s theme, “Plot Twist,” invites festival attendees to embrace the strange and the unpredictable.
Three past and present Yale-NUS faculty members Mr Lawrence Lacambra Ypil, Dr Carissa Foo, and Dr Balli Kaur Jaswal, will be part of the panel discussions at the 2023 Singapore Writers Festival.
Mr Ypil, Senior Lecturer of Humanities (Creative Writing) at Yale-NUS, will be reading his recent poetry at the festival’s closing reading, titled “An Unlikely Beginning,” alongside four other panellists. While his main interests in writing include history and the politics of violence, his latest work explores an entirely different topic. “For the closing reading, I will be sharing recently written poems about my father’s death,” said Mr Ypil. “They are poems of grief, but they are also poems trying to find new ways of speaking about loss. It is my continuing hope that the intimacy of poetry and its privateness, actually allows us to find affinity and commonality across differences.”
Yale-NUS Senior Lecturer of Humanities (Creative Writing) Lawrence Lacambra Ypil will be sharing his poetry at the Festival’s closing reading. Image provided by Lawrence Lacambra Ypil.
Musing on his involvement in this year’s Singapore Writers Festival, Mr Ypil noted, “I’ve been particularly interested in the ways in which poetry continues to be relevant, especially at a time when language seems to be just at the whim of power and privilege. What do we still hope poetry to articulate when there is already so much noise? What forms of silence does poetry offer to shape a way of listening to what we need to hear?”
Mr Ypil shared his upcoming plans in the literary world, “In the past two years, I have been working with artists from the Philippines, finding new ways of collaboration between text and image, photography and words, also finding ways to form reading communities outside and beyond mainstream platforms. A recent project has involved exploring the intersections of queer identity and memory.”
In addition to sharing his poetry at the closing reading, Mr Ypil will moderate a conversation with award-winning writer, poet, and broadcaster Lemn Sissay on how, even within the world’s dysfunction, we can still write poetry that disturbs as much as it illuminates.
Former Senior Lecturer of Humanities (Writing and Literature) Dr Carissa Foo will share a stage with two panellists at a conversation titled “So Much For My Happy Ending: Writing Open Closures in Fiction,” which will delve into writing open-ended narratives. “This year’s theme, Plot Twist, suggests difficult endings and looser ways of satisfying readerly desires. I hope attendees leave the talks and workshops with a messier and more varied perception of what stories can look like,” said Dr Foo.
Former Senior Lecturer of Humanities (Writing and Literature) Carissa Foo will be featured in a conversation on writing open-ended closures. Image provided by Carissa Foo.
Dr Balli Kaur, Lecturer of Humanities (English Language and Literature), will be featured as part of two talks: “Celebrity Book Culture: EXPOSED!!!” and “Women So Overt, They’re Covert.” The former conversation aims to uncover the influences of celebrities in the literary scene, while the latter will cover female protagonists who become unlikely sources of information in murder mystery novels.
Lecturer of Humanities (English Language and Literature) Balli Kaur will be a part of two conversations at the Singapore Writers Festival 2023. Image provided by Balli Kaur.
Alongside the faculty, the Festival also features Yale-NUS student Max Pasakorn (Class of 2024) who will reflect on their experience in the United States at a panel titled “An Identity Flux: Being Asian in America,” moderated by Yale-NUS alumnus Kristian-Marc James Paul (Class of 2019).
