SINGAPORE – By happy coincidence, Singaporean poet Felix Cheong will put out a bumper crop of seven books in a year, ranging from poetry to graphic novels to a United Kingdom reissue of his popular humour series, Singapore Siu Dai (2014 to 2016).

But the 58-year-old writer is not taking this windfall of publications for granted.

Between 2017 and 2023, he says, he had received more than 30 rejections from publishers and funding bodies such that he even talked to his wife about giving up.

Along with her encouragement to keep publishing, Cheong – who received the Young Artist Award for Literature in 2000 – decided he had to take things into his own hands and stage his reinvention.

“Once I got rejected so many times, I had to change. The publishers aren’t going to change for me because the market has changed,” Cheong tells The Straits Times in an interview at SPH Media Trust, where he teaches ST Masterclasses in creative writing.

He notes that the poetry market is shrinking with the shuttering of his publisher Math Paper Press, which put out his poetry collection B-Sides And Backslides: 1986-2018.

More broadly, Cheong brought up “the sheer fact that a lot of young people hardly read these days”.

But, he points out in an opinion piece for ST, graphic novels are on the rise in bookstores, libraries and classrooms. It was an opportunity for him to seek publication in a different genre.

In late 2023, he released the graphic novels Goh Keng Swee: A Singaporean For All Seasons – a creative non-fiction portrait of the pioneer statesman – and The Showgirl And The Minister, a speculative look at the mysterious disappearance of Singapore’s former chief minister Lim Yew Hock for 10 days in 1966.

In 2024, he will collaborate with 10 artists to adapt his Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award-longlisted collection Vanishing Point and release a zombie graphic novel Be Real: A Guide To Authenticity, which satirises the modern injunction to be real.

But do not mistake Cheong’s pivot to graphic novels as an abandonment of his poetic vocation.

He says he is always trying to smuggle poetry into his works in other genres as a way to make poetry “relevant and accessible”.

In this new phase of Cheong’s literary output, his poetry publications are also accompanied with illustrations. Dream A Granted Sky, published in 2023, features illustrations by Rukmunal Hakim and his forthcoming The Mischief Of Ordinary Things is inspired by artist Sam Lay’s works.

“I think collaboration is good for my creativity,” says Cheong, who adds that working with others helps him write about topics he does not usually talk about in his own poetic voice.

In a nod to the importance of visual culture to the contemporary writer’s vocation, Cheong adds: “You can still create your expansive and immersive stories, but not so much in words. You have to work in tandem with visuals, for the eye and not just for the mind.”

He confesses that because he is deemed to have moved away from “serious” literature, other writers tend to regard him as having “sold out”. “It’s been a hard battle for me to try and get what I am doing recognised.”

But Cheong regards the Singapore Book Council’s (SBC) move to create a new category for comics and graphic novels for the 2024 Singapore Literature Prize as a step in the right direction.

“It’s gratifying that the SBC acknowledges comics and graphic novels as legit literary forms – it’s about time. I hope this will encourage more writers, illustrators and publishers to cross into the genre, and grow a corpus of works.”

Despite the difficulty of the past half-decade, Cheong finds solace in the fact that he is carving out a different niche for himself. “Rejection was actually good for my soul. It was good for my writing because it forces me to stand up and say, ‘Don’t ignore me, I can still do this.’

“It’s a clarion call to other writers not to give up. Rejections come and go, but your art has to stay.”

• Felix Cheong’s Goh Keng Swee: A Singaporean For All Seasons ($24.54, amzn.to/4bCGt1G), The Showgirl And The Minister ($16.56, amzn.to/42EnAam) and The Mischief Of Ordinary Things ($18.40, amzn.to/3wkGcQU) are available from Amazon SG. Dream A Granted Sky is available from local bookstores. Singapore In A Box, Vanishing Point: The Comic Book; and Be Real: A Guide To Authenticity are forthcoming in 2024.