SINGAPORE – Hear from two-time Giller Prize winner and chair of the 2023 Booker Prize jury Esi Edugyan, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gregory Pardlo and New York Times best-selling academic Cat Bohannon at the Singapore Writers Festival (SWF) 2024.

Other big names revealed on Sept 3 include Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka, of The Seven Moons Of Maali Almeida (2020) fame, and Taiwanese prose stylist Kuo Chiang-sheng.

Also coming to town for the literary tentpole event is multi-hyphenate Indonesian artist Dee Lestari, who has released songs in tandem with her acclaimed short stories, and popular young-adult fiction writers Krystal Sutherland from Australia and Rin Chupeco from the Philippines.

First-time festival director Yong Shu Hoong and organiser Arts House Limited announced some of SWF’s line-up and the more than 200 programmes available from Nov 8 to 17 at a Goodman Arts Centre preview.

Themed In Our Nature, SWF 2024 invites attendees to reflect both on the environment as well as their own nature, as writers and readers, and as humans beings.

Festival passes can now be bought at www.singaporewritersfestival.com for $30, with an early-bird discount of 20 per cent if purchased before Oct 14.

Yong, who has pledged to reach out to the literary and non-literary crowd, has stacked the menu with more topical discussions than his predecessors. His focus on the environment not only includes poets coming together to map how their verses engage nature, but also academics who will offer pragmatic advice on climate action.

The typically uproarious festival debate bears the motion This House Believes That Life In Plastic Is Fantastic, and has been moved from an opening event to a closing one.

Bohannon and Lestari will deliver the two festival keynote lectures, with Bohannon particularly of-the-moment.

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