Singapore Writers Festival

The Singapore Writers Festival is a literary event organised by the National Arts Council. Inaugurated in 1986, the festival serves a dual function of promoting new and emerging Singaporean and Asian writing to an international audience, as well as presenting foreign writers to Singaporeans.

SWF has had literary luminaries such as Singapore writers Shamini Flint, Meira Chand, Alvin Pang, Suchen Christine Lim, You Jin, as well as international writers such as Steven Levitt,Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman,Bi Feiyu, David Mitchell, Bei Dao, F. Sionil Jose, Taichi Yamada, Andrew Motion, Alexis Wright and Marc Smith.

To date, it remains one of the few literary festivals in the world that is multi-lingual, celebrating works in Singapore’s official languages – English, Malay, Chinese and Tamil.

Formerly known as the Singapore Writers’ Week, the Singapore Writers’ Festival started in 1986 as a component of the Singapore Festival of Arts (now known as Singapore Arts Festival) that focuses on the merit of the literary arts. It was presented outside the Festival of Arts for the first time in 1991 as recognition and awareness for literary arts in Singapore grew. [1] Since then, SWF has been held every two years, until 2011 when it went annual.

The festival has traditionally been organised by the National Arts Council (NAC). However, since 2007, NAC has been working with The Arts House (TAH), to co-organise the festival. SWF 2007 attracted more than 21,000 attendees and SWF 2011 attracted more than 50,000 attendees.

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