She continued her education at CHIJ Katong, then studied literature at the National University of Singapore, and also obtained a post-graduate diploma in applied linguistics.

She published her first novel, Rice Bowl, in 1984 and also co-wrote a short play in 1986 titled The Amah: A Portrait In Black And White, which earned her the Merit Prize in the National University of Singapore-Shell Short Play Competition.

Her second novel, Gift From The Gods (1990), was nominated for a National Book Development Council award in 1992. She is best known as the inaugural winner of the Singapore Literature Prize for Fistful Of Colours (1992).

She attended the University of Iowa's prestigious Writers' Workshop on a Fulbright grant in 1996, and returned to Iowa as a writer-in-residence in 2000.

She has also served as writer-in-residence at the University of Western Australia in Perth, the Moniack Mhor Writers' Centre in the Scottish Highlands and Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, among others.

Her fourth novel, A Bit Of Earth (2000), was shortlisted for the 2004 Singapore Literature Prize, while The Lies That Build A Marriage, a collection of short stories, was published last year.

Besides writing, Lim worked as a curriculum specialist at the Ministry of Education for some 20 years, before retiring in August 2003 to focus on her fiction.

As she told Life! in a 2004 interview, it was hearing about the death of a Sars victim while at work that pushed her towards full-time writing: 'I asked myself: If I were to drop dead now, how would my soul feel? And my soul answered: Terribly unhappy.'

The author, who is divorced, has two grown sons aged 34 and 28.