/ARTS WEEKLY/CULTURE: Singapore Aims to be Asia’s Publishing Hub

By A. D. McKenzie Reprint | | Print |

A D McKenzie

SINGAPORE, Dec 9 2003 (IPS) - Imagine caustic writer and Nobel laureate V S Naipaul flying to this city state to sign copies of his latest book that has just been published here.

Imagine the bestselling Chinese American author Amy Tan choosing to have a Singaporean publisher produce her books. Imagine an Asian Literary Prize joining ranks with the likes of the Booker Prize.

R Ramachandran thinks all this could move from a dream to reality in a few years. Ramachandran is chairman of the National Book Development Council of Singapore (NBDCS), and his mission is to turn the country into the publishing hub of Asia, despite its reputation for strict censorship and media laws.

Singapore has long been a printing hub, with countries sending books to be produced here. But Ramachandran believes the tiny island of XXX million people could also be a publishing giant, with the ”literary arts as an industry” accounting for 6 percent of Gross Domestic Product by 2012.

”No other country but Singapore can act as a centre for publishing in Asia,” he says. ”We are already a hub in many ways with our airport and seaport and so we are in a superb position to create a niche area of publishing with Asian content and Asian perspective. We want to promote reading, writing and publishing in the region.”

To help achieve this mission or ”vision”, the NBDCS, a non-profit organisation known locally as ‘The Book Council’ and partly funded by the state through the National Arts Council, has announced several initiatives, including the re-launching of the Singapore Literature Prize.

This will be awarded in 2004 and every two years thereafter to works written in any of the country’s four official languages, Chinese, English, Malay and Tamil. The prize had been discontinued in 2000 because of lack of funds.

The announcement followed last week’s Asian Children’s Festival here in which writers, publishers and others in the literary field descended on Singapore for two successful conferences. These are the Asian Congress of Storytellers and The Asian Children’s Writers and Illustrators Conference, both organised by The Book Council.

Separately, Singapore also hosted the Second World Summit On The Arts And Culture in November, a four-day event that brought together some 150 representatives from 44 countries to discuss arts funding and promotion.

Further events are planned to heighten the country’s ”literary profile” and attract talent, Ramachandran said. In 2005, Singapore will host the Congress of Asian Writers in English, gathering writers from many nations to ”discuss their experiences and the challenges and opportunities of writing in English”.

The Book Council is also proposing the creation of an Asian literary prize.

”Talented writers could see this as a stepping stone on their way to collecting the Booker Prize, for instance,” Ramachandran said, pointing out that many winners of international prizes have been of Asian origin, such as Naipaul and the Commonwealth Prize winner Rohinton Mistry.

”Why shouldn’t Naipaul, Amy Tan and others publish their next book here in Singapore?” Ramachandran asked an audience of writers, publishers, bookstore owners and others, at a special event last month organised to bring the various sectors of the publishing industry together.

But critics might answer that the country’s tough media and libel laws will cast a shadow on The Book Council’s lofty dream.

Singapore in fact makes no apologies for censorship, declaring on one official website that censorship is practised ”to preserve our traditional Asian values such as importance of the family, respect for elders and filial piety”; to ”maintain racial harmony and religious tolerance amongst our people”; to ”protect our social fabric and ensure social cohesion”, and to ”protect children and young persons from corruption by undesirable materials”.

Earlier this month, the Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts, Dr Lee Boon Yang, criticised Australian journalist Michael Backman for attacking the government’s media policy in an article Backman wrote for a local paper.

According to a report by Singapore-based Channel News Asia, the minister said that foreign journalists ”should not use the local media as a platform to influence Singaporeans with their ideas of governance or policies of government, including policies on the media”.

This is despite the authorities’ stated mission of developing Singapore as a ”global city for information, communication and the arts”.

Fiction writers, such as the popular novelist and short-story author Catherine Lim, have also in the past been reprimanded when they openly found fault with government media policy.

Asked whether critical books would be allowed to be published here, in light of the official attitude, Ramachandran’s response is that the laws are becoming less stringent. ”The floodgates won’t open straight away because we are evolving as a society,” he says. ”But even so we are more open in an Asian context than many countries.”

One local writer, however, says that the laws keep changing and many in the publishing industry do not know whether ”they are coming or going”. Other writers complain that it is difficult to get their works published in Singapore and that they often have to resort to self-publishing.

But some book-industry representatives say the moves to promote the literary arts here will be positive for both writers and companies, despite government rules.

”There are many, many authors we can tap into in Asia, not only from Japan, but also from Korea and China. If you look at what’s being published by Western publishers, there are more titles by Chinese authors all the time, and a lot about Asia. Why aren’t Asian publishers doing this?” says Doreen Liu, president of the Publishers Association and managing director of World Scientific Publishing Co.

She says that Singaporean publishers are currently producing an increasing number of books in the scientific fields and that fiction could also be ”extended”.

And there is money to be made in the sector. According to Ramachandran, Asians spend 400 million Singapore dollars annually on buying books, and Asian libraries currently spend approximately 1 billion Singapore dollars on purchasing library materials.

Singaporean author and professor Kirpal Singh believes most writers will support the idea of Singapore as the Asian centre of publishing, but he is cautious about the motivations behind the initiative.

”It’s a good thing and it will become a reality if people dedicate themselves to it,” he says. ”But the flipside is that when we think about the arts, we often think about how to make money from this. We think about the commercial side. We should promote writers from the region for the sake of promoting them.”