Edmund Wee

EDMUND Wee, 65, is one of the leading champions of Singapore literature. His latest gamble is to open a London arm of his imprint Epigram Books so that Singapore novels published there can qualify for the world's most prestigious book award, the Man Booker Prize. This comes just two years after he launched the Epigram Books Fiction Prize, whose S$25,000 top cash prize is the most lucrative of literary awards here. In a literary scene dominated by poetry and short story collections, the prize spurred many aspiring and established writers to attempt that Great Singapore Novel. Sales for the first six titles from the prize's shortlist and longlist totalled more than 7,100 copies so far. But the former journalist is gunning for greater recognition for local titles, if only to sustain his six-year-old imprint for the long term.

You left your job as the design editor of The Straits Times in 1991 to start the award-winning design agency Epigram, known for its creative corporate annual reports. It was a successful business, yet you chose to switch to publishing fiction with Epigram Books in 2011. Why? I'm looking to do something more meaningful. From my 20s to 40, I was a journalist. From 40 to 60, I ran Epigram as a design agency. From 60 to 80, I've decided to publish fiction. That way, I have three careers in my lifetime. Getting into publishing was almost an accident. We got the manuscript for The Diary of Amos Lee around 2008/2009. When we published it, it became a hit. Total sales for the series is more than 204,000 in Singapore and Malaysia alone. But beyond our success with children's' titles such as Amos Lee and Sherlock Sam, we've had to struggle with the fiction titles. It's harder to make money in fiction and, for some titles such as The Art Of Charlie Chan Hock Chye and Death Of A Perm Sec, we've faced censorship issues. Still I believe in the importance of telling true Singaporean stories, and fiction is one of the areas of real expression in this country. What are the chances of a Singaporean winning the Man Booker? Hard to say, but increasingly we're seeing more Singaporeans like Daryl Qilin Yam (The Kappa Quartet), Amanda Lee Koe (Ministry of Moral Panic) and Stephanie Ye (The Billion Shop) who pursued creative writing at the university level and are full-time writers. They might do other things on the side to pay the bills, but writing comes first. Compare this to the first and second generation of Singapore writers, such as Goh Poh Seng, Gopal Baratham and Catherine Lim. All of them had full-time jobs. Writing was something they did on the side. In those days, if you told your parents you wanted to be in the arts, your parents would dissuade you. Lee Kuan Yew famously called poetry "a luxury we cannot afford". But things have changed now. We're seeing a new generation of trained writers fully focused on writing. Sure, it's hard financially. Which is why I tell writers: "Thank you for making art. I hope I can help you make a living." Were you always a lover of novels? No, I didn't read a lot as a child. I came from a poor family so I had little access to books. I fell in love with fiction only in university when, as a psychology student, I was assigned to read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Though a work of fiction, I became fascinated with a character who was willing to do anything for his beliefs. I started reading everything by Ayn Rand, and later the works of Singapore's literary pioneers. I am convinced that Singapore needs its own stories. For a long time, no one was writing novels. Even the National Arts Council lamented that they had given out money and grants to encourage it, but it still hadn't flourished. When Epigram Books launched the Fiction Prize in 2015, initially with a prize money of S$20,000, we received 69 submissions. In 2016, we received 52. I think that's progress. Last year's winner was Nuraliah Norasid's The Gatekeeper, which mixes Malay and Greek mythology to tell the story of a girl with snakes in her hair. Ultimately it is a story about Singapore, and it's so relevant to us. What does our literary scene need more or less of to advance? We don't have a strong literary review like there is in the West. We don't have someone like Oprah saying: "Read this book." Our newspapers don't champion Singlit enough - they're more likely to go with international authors. But people don't understand how important books are in showing us who we are and where we come from. Bookshops are dying because rents are so high - and not much is being done to save them. I set up Epigram Books in 2011 and we haven't broken even yet. Last year, I sold my entire book collection. I let go of my most treasured title, including my Letterpress Shakespeare of the four tragedies Macbeth, Othello, King Lear and Hamlet. But we needed the money to keep going. I'm also thinking of selling my paintings and, after that, my wine. It's been a difficult five years, but I think my team and I have done things we can be proud of: we published Singapore's most famous book, The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye by Sonny Liew. And recently, Amanda Lee Koe's Ministry of Moral Panic was translated into German and picked by the country's authoritative literary press as the number one translated book of the last quarter of 2016. As long as we can sustain this, we will keep going. We think what we do is so important.