Singapore Writers Festival 2024: British folk singer Sam Lee jams with nightingales every spring

SINGAPORE – Nightingales are the jazz musicians of the bird world, said British folk singer and conservationist Sam Lee, who has jammed with the night-singing bird in the woods every spring over the past decade.

In a lecture performance at the Singapore Writers Festival on Nov 16, Lee went behind the scenes of his enchanting live experience event Singing With Nightingales – in which Lee and a guest musician perform with the little brown bird in the Sussex woodlands.

“When the nightingales are singing – and it’s the males who are singing to find the female – they are so determined to be heard by the female and the other males that they don’t get scared and fly off,” says the author of The Nightingale: Notes On A Songbird (2021), a love letter to nature’s musician.

When playing with his musicians in the woods one night, Lee recalls: “The bird started to change his tune and sing with us, and I realised that this was another musician who understood collaboration.”

In an evening that delivered more lecture than performance, the Mercury Prize-nominated singer’s warm a cappella opening left audiences wanting more. Audio clips of folk songs from around the world – from traveller communities in Britain to Kashmir – opened up dazzling soundscapes at the Living Room in The Arts House.

Describing the nightingale in an almost mystical way – a “supercharged carrier of song” that emits “a decadence of soliloquies” – Lee’s project took a dark turn when he added that there are only 5,000 of the endangered species left in Britain and that nightingales are projected to go extinct in 20 years.

“To protect something, we have to love it first,” says Lee, who continues his Singing With Nightingales project in the spring of 2025.

In keeping with the festival theme of In Our Nature, Crossing Tongues: The Art Of Author-Translator Collaboration introduced ecological metaphors into the discussion of how partnerships between authors, translators and publishers help introduce new works to the literary landscape.

Dr Tung Roh Suan, founding director of Balestier Press, spoke about the concept of “bibliodiversity”, which refers to the desirable cultural richness in the publishing world. Balestier Press publishes world literature with a focus on Asia, including translations of works by Singaporean writers such as the late Yeng Pway Ngon.

When asked by moderator Amanda Ruiqing Flynn about the perfect conditions for a translation to grow, Dr Tung recognised that translation prizes have helped the ecosystem in Singapore, but emphasised that funding is also an essential ingredient.

South Korean writer Hwang Bo-reum and her

Singaporean translator Shanna Tan

– who became friends after the latter

translated Hwang’s best-selling Welcome To The Hyunam-dong Bookshop (2023)

– were also both on the panel at the River Room in the Asian Civilisations Museum.

The duo spoke of the unusually intimate – one might say symbiotic – relationship between the writer and translator in making the book a bestseller in its English translation. Hwang commented, through an interpreter, that she was thankful that Tan promoted the book so fervently that “she was like the writer herself”.

Tan said: “Translators are very close readers. I feel for what the characters are feeling and thinking and put that in my translations.”

The close-to-full-house panel ended with a long queue of fans seeking signatures from Hwang and Tan.