Writing Singapore Anglophone City Poetics and the Asian Experience A Conversation with Grace Chia

Grace Chia is the author of the poetry collections womango, Cordelia, and Mother of All Questions, the short-story collection Every Moving Thing That Lives Shall Be Food, and a novel, The Wanderlusters. She is also the editor of We R Family, an anthology about alternative families. Her work has been anthologized in many publications and translated into German, French, Serbo-Croat, Chinese, and Portuguese. The 2011-2012 NACNTU Writer-in-Residence, she has been awarded residencies in Macau and Korea. Her haiku collaboration with Dutch photographer Marcel Heijnen on a book about Hong Kong garage dogs was published in 2018. Here she discusses her home city, Singapore, including how now, in her own work, she is able to write with a different perspective, escaping its stranglehold and entering rapidly, much like Neo in The Matrix.