 | This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
 | |
| Industry | Publishing (and Design) |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1991 |
| Headquarters | Singapore |
| Products | Literary Fiction and Non-fiction |
| Website | Epigram Books |
Epigram Books is an independent publishing company in Singapore. It publishes works of Singapore-based writers, poets and playwrights.
Epigram was founded in 1991 by Edmund Wee as a design agency. [1] [2] Epigram began the publishing and designing of annual reports before expanding its portfolio to include more diverse design work such as wayfinding, corporate logo branding, and graphic design. Notable clients of Epigram include OCBC Bank, Singapore Airlines, Media Development Authority and CapitaLand. [3] [4]
Epigram has won international awards for their designs of annual reports, including the Hong Kong Design Awards and the Graphis Gold Award for Annual Reports. [5] [6] They are the first company in the world to win the Grand Prix award at the Red Dot consecutively. [5] They received commissions for commemorative books from agencies such as the National Trades Union Congress and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. [2]
The company Epigram Books, the publishing arm of Epigram set up in 1999, published its first book with mountaineer David Lim’s Mountain to Climb: The Quest for Everest and Beyond. Epigram Books bore the design and printing costs of the book and sold 5000 copies. Epigram Books was incorporated as a separate entity from the parent company in July 2011. [7]
In 2015, Epigram Books launched a fiction prize, the Epigram Books Fiction Prize, with an award of $20,000. The first edition was won by O Thiam Chin. [8]
In January 2021 Epigram Books, which set up its London arm in November 2016, announced it would stop publishing in the United Kingdom in order to shore up its Singapore business amid the COVID-19 slowdown. [9]
Epigram Books has published a series of cookbooks, under the Heritage Cookbook series. [10] In 2010, it published There’s No Carrot in Carrot Cake, a guide book to Singapore’s street food (or hawker food in colloquial terms). The book sparked a debate in the media about the need for a culinary school to preserve Singapore’s food heritage. [11] [12]
A short story, Moving Forward, included in the compilation of Andrew Tan’s Monsters, Miracles & Mayonnaise was nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Short Story in 2013. Monsters, Miracles & Mayonnaise is one of the three graphic novels that was published by the company in 2012. Epigram Books is also the first Singaporean publishing house to have a comic book nominated for this prize. [13] [14] Another graphic novel, Ten Sticks and One Rice by Oh Yong Hwee and Koh Hong Teng won an International MANGA Award (Bronze) in 2014. [15]
Other than publishing books by debut authors, Epigram Books has also taken to republish books that are out-of-print Singapore classics, such as Jean Tay’s Boom and Everything but the Brain and Goh Poh Seng’s The Immolation. [16] [17] The company has also launched the Cultural Medallion series, where non-English literature award recipients are translated into English. [17] Some of the works include Singai M. Elangkannan’s Flowers at Dawn, Suratman Markasan’s Penghulu and Wong Meng Voon’s Under the Bed, Confusion. [18]
In 2016, Epigram Books was shortlisted for the Bologna Prize for the Best Children’s Publishers of the Year at the 53rd Bologna Children’s Book Fair. The award rewards creative, innovative publishers based on “the editorial projects, professional skills and intellectual qualities of work produced by publishing houses all over the world”. [19] [20] In the same year, Epigram Books won four out of eight prizes at the Singapore Book Awards, including Book Of The Year for Sonny Liew's The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye and Best Fiction Title for Amanda Lee Koe's Ministry of Moral Panic. [21]
Launched in 2015, the Epigram Books Fiction Prize has been awarded annually to the best original and unpublished novel in the English language written by a Singaporean citizen, Singapore permanent resident, or Singapore-born writer. [8] Until 2023, the prize was Singapore's richest literary prize, with the highest prize being $25,000 SGD, before being surpassed by the Dr Alan HJ Chan Spirit of Singapore Book Prize. [22] [23] The inaugural 2015 Prize was won by O Thiam Chin for his novel Now That It's Over, [8] while the 2016 Prize was won by Nuraliah Norasid for her novel The Gatekeeper [24] and the 2017 Prize to Sebastian Sim for The Riot Act. In 2018, Yeoh Jo-Ann's Impractical Uses Of Cake won, and it was announced that from 2019, the Prize prize will be open to writers from other ASEAN countries, not only Singapore. [25]
In 2020, Malaysian author Joshua Kam won, with his book, How the Man in Green Saved Pahang, and Possibly the World. [26]
In January 2021, two writers – Meihan Boey and Sebastian Sim – were named joint winners of the 2021 Prize. [27] This is the first time two joint winners have won the Prize and the first time an author has won it twice. [27] [28]
| Year | Title | Author | Ref |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | Now That It's Over | O Thiam Chin | [29] |
| 2016 | The Gatekeeper | Nuraliah Norasid | [30] |
| 2017 | The Riot Act | Sebastian Sim | [31] |
| 2018 | Impractical Uses of Cake | Yeoh Jo-Ann | [32] |
| 2020 | How The Man In Green Saved Pahang, And Possibly The World | Joshua Kam | [33] |
| 2021 [lower-alpha 1] | The Formidable Miss Cassidy | Meihan Boey | [34] |
| And The Award Goes to Sally Bong | Sebastian Sim | ||
| 2022 | The Accidental Malay | Karina Robles Bahrin | [35] |
| 2023 | The Campbell Gardens Ladies’ Swimming Class | Vrushali Junnarkar | [36] |
Catherine Lim Poh Imm is a Singaporean fiction author known for writing about Singapore society and of themes of traditional Chinese culture. Hailed as the "doyenne of Singapore writers", Lim has published nine collections of short stories, five novels, two poetry collections, and numerous political commentaries to date. Her social commentary in 1994, titled The PAP and the people - A Great Affective Divide and published in The Straits Times, criticised the ruling political party's agendas.
The literature of Singapore comprises a collection of literary works by Singaporeans. It is written chiefly in the country's four official languages: English, Malay, Standard Mandarin and Tamil.
Philip Antony Jeyaretnam is a Singaporean judge, lawyer and author who has been serving as a Judge of the High Court of Singapore since 1 November 2021, having been first appointed to the Bench as a Judicial Commissioner on 4 January 2021. He has served as President of the Singapore International Commercial Court since 2 January 2023. Prior to his appointment to the Bench, he served as ASEAN chief executive officer and global vice-chair at Dentons. He also served as president of the Law Society of Singapore between 2004 and 2007. Jeyaretnam was also one of the youngest lawyers to be appointed Senior Counsel in 2003 at the age of 38.
Daren Shiau, BBM, PBM, is a Singaporean novelist, poet, conservationist, and lawyer in private practice qualified in Singapore, England and Wales. He is an author of five books.
Sonny Liew is a Malaysia-born comic artist/illustrator based in Singapore. He is best known for The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (2015), the first graphic novel to win the Singapore Literature Prize for fiction.
Sago Lane is a one-way lane in Chinatown within the Outram Planning Area in Singapore. The street links Banda Street to Neil Road. In the past, the street was much longer and was home to funeral parlours or death houses. Part of the street was demolished in the late 1960s due to the construction of the new HDB development at Kreta Ayer, also known as Chinatown Complex. Currently the street, is mainly used during Chinese New Year as part of the festive bazaar in Chinatown.
Ning Cai is a magician and a Singapore Literature Prize-nominated author.
Boey Kim Cheng is a Singaporean Australian poet.
Gwee Li Sui is an acclaimed bestselling writer in Singapore. He works in poetry, comics, non-fiction, criticism, and translation. He is the author of Spiaking Singlish, possibly the first book on Singlish written entirely in Singlish, complete with colloquial spelling.
Lai Kui Fang was a Singaporean artist who studied on a French government scholarship at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts.
Writing in Asia Series was a series of books of Asian writing published from 1966 to 1996 by Heinemann Educational Books (Asia) Ltd, a subsidiary of Heinemann, London. Initiated and mainly edited by Leon Comber, the series brought attention to various Asian Anglophone writers, like Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Western writers based in Asia like Austin Coates and W. Somerset Maugham and modern and classic stories and novels in English translation from the Malay, Indonesian, Thai and more. The series is also credited with contributing prominently to creative writing and the creation of a shared regional identity amongst English-language writers of Southeast Asia. After publishing more than 110 titles, the series folded after Heinemann Asia was taken over by a parent group of publishers and Comber left.
The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye is a graphic novel by Sonny Liew published in 2015 by Epigram Books and 2016 by Pantheon Books. It tells the story of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, a fictional cartoonist, from his early days in colonial life to the present day, while showcasing extracts of his comics depicting allegories of political situations of the time. The comic features a mixture of black and white sketches depicting Singapore's early history contrasted with color comics depicting the present, with several comics within the novel telling their own story. The book was awarded the Singapore Literature Prize following its publication in 2016. The book soon gained widespread critical acclaim internationally and was given several awards, including three Eisner Awards in 2017.
Jeremy Tiang is a Singaporean writer, translator and playwright based in New York City. Tiang won the 2018 Singapore Literature Prize for English fiction for his debut novel, State of Emergency, published in 2017.
Nuraliah Norasid is a Singaporean author. She won the Epigram Books Fiction Prize for her first novel, The Gatekeeper, in 2016. She currently works as a research associate with the Centre for Research on Islamic and Malay Affairs, where she studies social marginalisation.
Jean Tay is a Singaporean playwright, best known for her plays Everything But the Brain and Boom. Her works have been performed in Singapore, the US, the UK and Italy. She is the artistic director and co-founder of Saga Seed Theatre.
Sebastian Sim is a Singaporean author, including of wuxia novels. He won the 2017 Epigram Books Fiction Prize for best original and unpublished novel in the English language written by a Singaporean citizen, Singapore permanent resident or Singapore-born writer for his novel, The Riot Act. In 2021, he won again in the same category for his novel And The Award Goes To Sally Bong!.
Founded in 1986, Landmark Books is an independent publisher based in Singapore. The company publishes a wide range of genres, spanning art books, cookbooks, heritage, prose, poetry as well as business / investment guides. They also provide publishing and consultancy services.
Mohamed Latiff Mohamed was a Singaporean Malay poet and writer.
O Thiam Chin is a Singaporean author. Many of his stories explore themes of love, heartbreak, alienation and gay male sexuality.
Death of a Perm Sec is a 2016 novel written by Singaporean playwright, former political detainee, and former Chairman of the Singapore Democratic Party Dr Wong Souk Yee. The book depicts the mystery and fallout surrounding the demise of the Permanent Secretary of the housing ministry, Chow Sze Teck, after he was accused of accepting millions of dollars in bribes over his career. The novel explores the dark heart of power politics, from the country’s tumultuous post-independence days to the socio-political landscape of the 1980s. Death of a Perm Sec was one of four finalists for the inaugural Epigram Books Fiction Prize in 2015, and was subsequently shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
