Fresh off our sold-out run in June, Book A Writer presents a special, one-time only workshop with writer Alfian Sa’at – now open to all ages and experience levels

With limited seats available, book now to experience the magic of our Book A Writer programmes.

DETAILS

Dates: 19 October 2024

Time: 2pm-4pm

Location: Sing Lit Station, 22 Dickson Road, #02-01, Singapore 209506

PLEASE NOTE: Sing Lit Station is only accessible by stairs. Please drop us a message at bookawriter@singlitstation.com if you have any accessibility questions. We also have a cat in the office, with antihistamines available in the pantry area for anyone with allergies.

ABOUT THE WORKSHOP

A Translingual Toolkit: Writing in Multiple Languages with Alfian Sa’at

In Singapore, a universal bilingual education has meant that most of us speak English as well as a mother tongue language. Yet many of us treat these languages as separate, and often describe ourselves as ‘deficient’ or ‘one-sided’ bilinguals, often with a mastery over just one of those two languages.

Enter the idea of the ‘translingual’, someone who moves across languages, and is interested in the contact between those languages. What does it mean to write in two languages, at the same time? In the plays of Haresh Sharma, characters are using English, but with Malay, Mandarin or Tamil syntax and loan words, creating new theatrical languages. And various Chinese-background poets have tried their hand at poems which elaborate on Chinese ideograms.

In this workshop, we will explore the creation of translingual texts—how the vocabulary and structure of languages like Malay, Tamil, Hindi etc can inflect our own English-language writings. We will test the effects of translingual experimentations on other Anglophone readers: as novelty, strangeness, haunting and mystery.

Note: Recommended for participants with some basic knowledge of a non-English language.

ABOUT ALFIAN SA’AT

Alfian Sa’at is the Resident Playwright of Wild Rice. His published works include three collections of poetry: One Fierce Hour, A History of Amnesia and The Invisible Manuscript; a collection of short stories, Corridor; a collection of flash fiction, Malay Sketches; three collections of plays as well as the published play Cooling-Off Day and Hotel. He has also translated two novels from Malay to English: Isa Kamari’s The Tower and Mohamed Latiff Mohamed’s The Widower. In 2001, Alfian won the Golden Point Award for Poetry as well as the National Arts Council Young Artist Award for Literature. His plays and short stories have been translated into Thai, Indonesian, German, Swedish, Mandarin, Korean and Japanese.