Singaporean of the Year finalist: Edmund Wee bets his personal wealth on championing Sing Lit

SINGAPORE – Home-grown publisher Epigram Literary Foundation chairman Edmund Wee is a maverick.

From setting up shop in London to restructuring Epigram as a foundation and launching an online bookshop with other independent bookstores, he has constantly reached for the unexpected in the course of pushing Singapore Literature (Sing Lit).

Fresh from

a landmark compact with regional publishers

that will take Sing Lit to five major South-east Asian markets, he says: “Not that I don’t want to make money, but what if we didn’t think about money first?”

At the Frankfurt Book Fair in October, Mr Wee scored a coup by getting five South-east Asian publishers – Malaysia’s The Biblio Press, Indonesia’s Elex Media Komputindo, Thailand’s River Books, the Philippines’ Milflores Publishing and Myanmar’s NDSP Books – to commit to publishing four Epigram Books Fiction Prize winners a year up till 2028 (2030 for the Philippines).

In an industry first, he solved the perennial problem of book distribution by outsourcing to partners with their own channels.

Persuading them to publish manuscripts they had not even read required him to

absorb much of the upfront costs

. Epigram waived the substantial sum these publishers typically had to pay for distribution rights, settling instead for higher royalties for each copy of the books sold.

It is a gambit in service of a higher cause, he says. “I realised I needed to foster the readers first. Even if 10 per cent of South-east Asians read English, that’s 70 million people. It’s important that in Asean, we know each other. How do you do that? Read each other’s stories.”

This latest achievement is only one in a string of daring bets he has made on Sing Lit since Epigram Books was established in 2011.

Long one of the industry’s most innovative players – always thinking big picture and sometimes at his own expense – the 73-year-old has found ways forward for an industry besieged by changing reading patterns, a turn to the digital and suffocating costs.

Singapore’s small market and reading public was what drove him to lead the charge outwards, including successful sales of titles like Meihan Boey’s Miss Cassidy series (2021 to 2025) to Britain, the United States, Albania and Italy.

For that, he is one of five finalists who have been announced to date for the 11th The Straits Times Singaporean of the Year (SOTY) award.

Organised by The Straits Times and presented by Swiss multinational investment bank UBS, the prize is given to a Singaporean or group of citizens who have made a significant contribution to society.

Mr Wee is also the president of the Singapore Book Publishers Association – the second two-year term he is helming the group of 67 members that range from multinational to academic and indie presses. It is a thankless job, but it is also a macro-perspective he naturally adopts.

“Very few people here want to, or can, think beyond their own company, and you need to. There’s so many things that should be done for publishing. Someone needs to articulate the problem.”

He has been lobbying for Singapore libraries to buy more copies of published books and the institution of public lending rights, where authors are recompensed each time a book is borrowed, a scheme already adopted by some 35 countries.

He has also been urging the Government to think about more structural support for vernacular publishers. If his South-east Asian deal expands English books’ print runs from about 1,000 in Singapore to many times that, the starting point of Malay and Tamil publishers is only between 300 and 500 copies.

“They can’t survive. Unless you agree that it’s all about market forces and they don’t have to be around.”

The grandest project of all is fund-raising for an eventual Asean literature prize. South-east Asia, despite a population of over 700 million, has no Nobel laureates in literature, in part because of the lack of champions willing to see it as a bloc and translate books in regional languages into English.

Mr Wee has raised this idea to the Asean Book Publishers Association, with the aim of each country raising $1 million to $1.5 million for the prize. Member states say they are in the process of raising the money but there remains reservations over business specifics like who gets to publish the book and who pays for translation costs.

To these, he responds with the same gung-ho attitude: “I always say, ‘Agree first, talk details later’. All these other things can be overcome.”

His determination to promote Sing Lit kept him going even when he was diagnosed with stage three prostate cancer in 2022 – publishing books, running the Epigram Books Fiction Prize, setting up a new children’s book festival and raising funds. His cancer markers are now low enough for treatment to be suspended, though he is not yet cancer-free.

Asked why he keeps beating his way through the thorniest path, Mr Wee says it is about pursuing what moves the needle. While other publishers have reduced output to about six new titles a year, he keeps at a steady clip of 25 to 30.

Epigram Books Fiction Prize is one of the most coveted awards, with its $25,000 cash grant and publishing contract – the only one of its kind and now open to the rest of South-east Asia.

He says: “I must have lost millions over the years, but I don’t have debt.”

If he wins the $20,000 SOTY prize money, the lion’s share will go to Epigram.

He recalls the niggling feeling that got him to switch from the more lucrative design business to publishing in 2011: “You can do the greatest design of an annual report or win awards overseas. But what does it mean?

“You publish a good book, and it will last forever.”