New ST art interactive shows how SingLit writes about Singapore River, HDB, hawker centres

SINGAPORE – The desperate slithering of a panicked snake and a heart bypass for an old lady seem to have nothing in common. Yet each metaphor was used by authors, 142 years apart, to bring the familiar Singapore River to life.

A new illustrated interactive project (

str.sg/viz-books

) by The Straits Times mines 60 iconic Singapore literature texts to discover the ways local writers have written about common spaces.

Follow a jaunty SG60 bookmark as it is whipped by a peripatetic wind across the Singapore River, a hawker centre and a Housing Board (HDB) estate – each evoked in a distinct art style by ST artists – and encounter some choice quotes.

Near the river, there is intrigue as a character in Yeng Pway Ngon’s Unrest (2012) goes low-profile by getting a job serving coffee.

Metres away, Suchen Christine Lim’s protagonist in Fistful Of Colours (1992) glances out at the warm sunset.

Or head up a flight of steps in an HDB block to dwell on the pointed listing of shoes idly scattered in front of a flat in Ng Yi-Sheng’s Lion City (2018): “sneakers, high heels, bowed flats, moccasins, flip-flops, even a pair of chalk-white schoolroom shoes from Bata”.

Across the block, Balli Kaur Jaswal conjures a vision of crowded rattan birdcages in Sugarbread (2016).

ST’s deputy interactive graphics editor Marcelo Duhalde says his team wanted to use an art-forward approach to attract an audience who might not be particularly fond of literature.

Inspired by Japanese illustrator Takashi Nakamura’s expansive evocation of ordinary life – subjects occupying a relatively small space in the overall setting – the drawings emphasise the interconnectivity and wealth of stories in these sites of collective memory.

More than 100 illustrations were created.

Mr Duhalde says: “It is a visual experiment that has taken us time, but has been very rewarding to produce. The style of the illustrations can be loose, less finished but highly expressive and revealing, and that helps to maintain attention.

“It’s not necessary to include explanations all the time.”

Digital graphics journalist Hannah Ong conceptualised the project and worked with ST’s arts team to shortlist 60 predominantly post-independence books from which the scenes are extracted.

These are good starting points for a SingLit reading list and are displayed chronologically here with statistics on the number of times they have been borrowed from libraries between 2016 and August 2025, courtesy of the National Library.

Several titles have no data as they are available only in the reference sections.

The 60 books build on a previous ST project in 2015 that got literary experts to vote on

the 50 greatest works of SingLit.

They begin with Munsyi Abdullah’s 1849 memoir Hikayat Abdullah, translated by A.H. Hill from Jawi in 1945, and end with Jemimah Wei’s tale of sister rivalry in The Original Daughter (2025).

Amanda Lee Koe’s 2013 Ministry Of Moral Panic is the most borrowed by a wide margin, having been checked out by library users 10,373 times.

None of the books were fed into open-AI systems for this project.

Ms Ong says: “There isn’t a single right way to tell a story, and I’m happy this is how we chose to tell this specific one.”