Unhappy fans at R.F. Kuang book signing and what writers are reading

SINGAPORE – The Singapore Writers Festival 2025 (SWF) on Nov 8 faced the happy but challenging problem of a surfeit of participants.

The bookshop, still occupying half a room in The Arts House, at points required acrobatics to manoeuvre. Crowd converted to profit for authors such as Wen-yi Lee, whose newly published When They Burned The Butterfly sold out by 3pm.

Festival passes are also sold out, as the organisers announced on social media on Nov 9.

The festival was unprepared for just how in-demand R.F. Kuang was. The dark academia author, concluding her keynote session on the evening of Nov 8, was still on stage when there was a surge out of the Victoria Theatre to join the signing queue, no time for final applause.

Whereupon those exiting found themselves in a sea of people, two to three abreast and flummoxed as to where the line began. Some took it with enough humour to smack their foreheads for sprinting in the wrong direction, but others were already posting complaints online on Nov 8.

The situation had reportedly spiralled to a point where brave ushers had to enter the queue to form a human barricade to separate lines.

One key gripe was that a one-book-per-reader and no-photo policy was not told to participants in advance, the author perhaps more aware than SWF organisers of the passion her first stop in Singapore would elicit.

Those who had not paid the additional $25 to the sold-out keynote were also in the unmarked queue, which caused some indignation when it was announced that Kuang would sign books for just an hour.

The lack of interaction time must have also disappointed. Some had flown in from overseas with suitcases of books. Nonetheless, the organisers said the 330 people in the queue all managed to get their books signed within the hour. Who says the SWF is not exciting?

Arts House Group executive director Sharon Tan called it a “Taylor Swift moment” for the literary arts. “We have seen many memorable and huge book signings at SWF, but this was on another scale.”

The Nov 9 signing for Kuang went more smoothly. SWF sent out early alerts to participants, divided the atrium into sections and got more volunteers to help with crowd control.

Elsewhere, there were well-attended sessions with rooms often at maximum capacity before panels’ starting time.

The women’s poetry panel Poetry Is Not A Luxury at the Asian Civilisations Museum’s Discovery Room, by Singapore poets Pooja Nansi and Marylyn Tan, together with South Korean poet Kim Yideum, was so packed, disappointed attendees exiting the building were informing other hopefuls not to queue.

Kim prompted glee in the room when Nansi and Tan’s readings so impressed her, she said she was interested in getting them translated to Korean. Kim’s explicit poems like Country Whore so upset some men, she was once accused of all manner of nasty things by a “gentleman” during a public reading.

A more niche festival keynote talk in Mandarin saw historian Shi Zhan from Shanghai International Studies University explaining why the Nanyang Chinese were critical in the 1911 Chinese Revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty.

This influence from what has traditionally been thought as a peripheral settlement from China’s perspective has always interested him, and his research takes him back, including the expansion of Qing territories by the Manchus that finally allowed that geography to support nearly 430 million people by the mid-19th century.

The population boom from 150 million at the dynasty’s start forced the migration South, with cheap labour in the motherland meaning that there was no need for innovation or technical revolution. The Nanyang Chinese were so important because they could absorb Western ideas and retranslate them for the Chinese context. “Revolution was the only possibility,” he says.

Bonus factoids from other sessions

When was the first work of Singapore science fiction published? Earlier than most might guess. During a panel, writer Ng Yi-Sheng proposed the 1898 story The Travels Of Chang Ching Chong, an anonymous piece published in The Straits Chinese Magazine. Independent researcher Nurul ‘Ain Razali does him one better: the tales of Puteri Gunung Ledang in the 17th-century Salalatus Salatin or Malay Annals.

Author recommendations: Writers are readers too. So, science-fiction author Ken Liu recommended Alexandre Dumas’ The Count Of Monte Cristo (1846), while Singapore speculative fiction writer Neon Yang talked about being obsessed with Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy during their panel session. Kuang talked about Patricia Lockwood, so look out for influence from that direction in the prolific author’s next work, Taipei Story, which is due out September 2026.