Singapore Writers Festival 2025: Where food meets sci-fi and poetry
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(Clockwise from top left) Ms Fuchsia Dunlop, Mr Ken Liu and Ms Victoria Chang.
PHOTOS: YUKI SUGIURA, LISA TANG LIU, KIM YIDEUM
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SINGAPORE – The Singapore Writers Festival (SWF), the most popular literary event here, runs from Nov 7 to 16 in 2025, featuring keynote speakers including best-selling fantasy author R.F. Kuang and sci-fi writer Ken Liu.
More than 200 programmes and over 300 local and international presenters will congregate at The Arts House, Victoria Theatre and Asian Civilisations Museum. These, in turn, are expected to draw 20,000 people over the two weekends.
The Straits Times interviews three key headliners and picks out 14 programmes to look out for. A standard festival pass starts from $30 and is eligible for SG Culture Pass credits.
Chef-author Fuchsia Dunlop looks forward to eating in Singapore
English author Fuchsia Dunlop is looking forward to the food when she comes to town for the Singapore Writers Festival (SWF) 2025 in November.
She says over a video call from her London home: “I’m always interested to experience food in its cultural and historical context. Singapore is so interesting because you have a collision of lots of different cultures. Although my focus has been on Chinese food in China, I’m completely fascinated by the intersection between Chinese food and Malay, Indian, South-east Asian.”
The trained chef is one of the early champions of Chinese cuisine in the West, publishing her landmark Sichuan Cookery in 2001.
Her most recent book is the entertainingly erudite Invitation To A Banquet (2024),
Sci-fi author Ken Liu finds fears of AI replacing writers boring
American science-fiction and fantasy author Ken Liu.
PHOTO: LISA TANG LIU
The literary community may be in a state of frenzy over the threat of artificial intelligence (AI), but American science-fiction and fantasy author Ken Liu, engaged by the Singapore Writers Festival to deliver a keynote speech on the subject in November, says stone-faced over Zoom: “That’s not terribly interesting to me.”
These are fighting words in today’s clime, but no one can accuse the 49-year-old’s opinion of being unconsidered. Once a software engineer and later a technology rights lawyer, he is among the rare breed of creatives who can claim expertise in both the arts and the computer sciences.
Today, he is razor-focused on the productive fertility of new AI tools. He is almost brusque when brushing off its impact on writers as the latest in a long history of market shifts caused by changes in technology.
How poet Victoria Chang handles grief using numbers
American poet Victoria Chang.
PHOTO: KIM YIDEUM
American poet Victoria Chang likes to count – the number of grids in an Agnes Martin painting, the syllables on her fingers, how many times her father fell after a stroke, the days leading up to his death.
“When I feel stressed, I start to breathe and count. It’s a form of meditation – numbers are very soothing to me,” says the 54-year-old daughter of a mathematics teacher and an engineer, and sister to a percussionist. She grew up in a “quantitative family”.
Her mother died in 2015 from pulmonary fibrosis and her father died in 2022 after a debilitating stroke.
In her latest collection, With My Back To The World (2024), the poet’s topics are depression and grief, and she has turned to the geometric abstraction of Canadian-American painter Martin (1912 to 2004) to work out her feelings.
14 events for families, foodies and more
South Korean author Baek Se-hee autographing her books at the Singapore Writers Festival 2024.
PHOTO: MOONRISE STUDIO
The Straits Times arts team has ploughed through the dense SWF schedule and unearthed gems for a range of demographics, from families to hardcore readers.
There are picks for the science fiction-inclined, the history nerd, the poetry lover, the foodie and, yes, those who want to catch a glimpse of their favourite Singapore author.
Here are our recommendations.
