The Aesop Women’s Library

In searching for a sense of place, We Make Spaces Divine navigates the physical landmarks and the invisible boundaries that shape our quotidian existence. Vibrant and deftly crafted, Pooja Nansi’s poetry weaves memories from her formative years, pop culture and music. Pooja Nansi has published three collections of poetry and has staged numerous performances of spoken word and theatre. She was honoured with Singapore’s Young Artist Award in 2016 and in the following year, was appointed the inaugural Youth Poet Ambassador. Since 2019, she has helmed the Singapore Writer’s Festival.

Prize-winning novella-memoir 'Others' Is Not A Race unfolds around Singapore’s Eurasian community. Speaking of the role of language as a culture, exclusion, and reconstructed memories, Melissa De Silva’s personal and questioning prose reignites the conversation around the minority experience. Melissa De Silva’s work concentrates on ideas of identity and heritage, and has been published in Cha, LONTAR, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, among other independent journals. Her first book, Others’ is Not a Race, was awarded a Singapore Literature Prize in 2018.

Professions chronicles the vast landscape of the heart—a journey marked by intimacy, longing, and occasional despair. Lyrical and poignant, Amanda Chong’s poetry explores the nuances of the human condition alongside the multifaceted nature of womanhood. Lawyer Amanda Chong made her writing debut with Professions in 2016, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Singapore Literature Prize. More recently, she has penned The Feelings Farm, staged at Esplanade, and #WomenSupportingWomen. The latter was the recipient of T:>Works' 24 Hour Playwriting Open Category Award 2021.

Tracing passages of time, places and people has led Stephanie Chan on a path of self-discovery in Roadkill For Beginners, her first collection of poetry. As she oscillates between different cities, Chan’s coming-of-age story looks at social injustice, sexuality, and gender politics as she seeks to find her place in the world. Stephanie ‘Dogfoot’ Chan initially trained in law before pursuing performance and poetry. As well as authoring Roadkill For Beginners, she has co-edited numerous poetry collections including the 2017 and 2018 editions of SingPoWriMo and EXHALE: An Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices.

A bilingual poetry anthology, Sikit-Sikit Lama-Lama Jadi Bukit gathers up-and-coming and esteemed voices from Singapore’s Malay literary canon and traverses lost geographies—through nuanced and reflective vignettes—as well as timeless issues of social and cultural transformation. As an educator and translator, Annaliza Bakri seeks to transcend cultural borders through her work. Her translations of Malay poetry have been published in Prairie Schooner, Brooklyn Rail, as well as Transnational Literature, and The Art House, Singapore’s Text in the City.