S2E3: Building Reading Communities
Summary Keywords
Reading communities, multilingual literature, local literature, translation regional outreach, literary partners, literary ecosystem, children’s literature, reading events, cultural exchange, community engagement, book development
00:03 Host, Loh Chin Ee
Edwin Thumboo, Arthur Yap, Lee Tzu Pheng, Mohamed Latiff Mohamed, Ying Pei An, Suchen Christine Lim, Liang Wen Fu, Jessie Wee, Alvin Pang, Alfian Saat, Neil Humphreys, Amanda Lee Koe, Adelin Foo, Eliza Teoh. In case you were wondering, I was reading out a list of some of our well-known Singapore writers, including some of our literary giants, such as Edwin Thumboo. I've also included names of children book writers such as Jessie Wee and Adelin Foo. Did you recognize at least five names in that list?
A country's heritage is shaped by its literature, and a reading nation is one where its citizens celebrate its own literature, not-for-profit organisations such as the Singapore Book Council or government bodies such as the National Arts Council in Singapore and the National Book Development Board in the Philippines grow the reading community by making connections between authors, publishers, booksellers and readers, as well as creating an ecosystem where local literature can flourish. In this episode, building reading communities, we explore the work of these organisations and learn how they build community through people-centric programming and events.
Chapter One: The Singapore Book Council.
William Phuan is the Executive Director of the Singapore Book Council. Formerly Director of the Arts House and Programme Director of the New York Asian American International Film Festival, William is very much immersed in the literary arts. He tells us more about the Singapore Book Council.
01:45 William Phuan
Whenever I tell people I work at the Singapore Book Council, people will always ask, “what is that?” And then, then the second question is, “oh, there's a book council in Singapore,” and “how is it different from the library?” So the book council actually has been around for a very long time. We were established in 1968, so just a few years after Singapore gained its independence. So it's a non-profit and then charity. It was set up by a group of volunteer librarians who wanted to promote reading and literacy in Singapore across the different languages. So the main vision is really to promote Singapore literature in the different languages, different genres. So I think our mission has remained quite constant over the years, but obviously the whole publishing industry, the books industry, has changed a lot. So, we still remain committed to cultivating, developing a very multicultural, multilingual literary arts sector, but the ways of doing it are very different from way back when it was first established.
We do quite a wide range of different programs. We do a capability development programme. Our training programs help writers, translators, illustrators, to get better at their craft, so we organise workshops, talks, master classes, and we also recognise the excellent words by Singapore writers. We give out a few awards, one of which the main one is the Singapore Literature Prize. It’s a biannual literary award that's given to the best words by Singapore writers across the four languages, but also in different genres like poetry, creative non-fiction and fiction. And this year, we added new categories – comics, graphic novels and translation. It's one of the very few multilingual literary prizes in the world, but I think it's very important to highlight the multiculturalism and multilingualism among our writers.
03:30 Host, Loh Chin Ee
While Singapore is a multilingual country with a bilingual education system, the emphasis on English as the language of education and business since the early 1980s has succeeded so well that many young Singaporeans tend to be more proficient in reading in English than their mother tongue languages. This creates challenges for both reading and writing.
03:53 William Phuan
Oh, there's so many challenges, one of which is obviously reading of books, especially in mother tongue languages. I think that readership has gone down quite a bit, but also the proficiency in writing in those languages has also gone down quite a bit. So trying to promote books or writing in our mother tongue languages is very, very challenging compared to English, English being the default mode of communication, writing and instruction now, so I think that is more vibrant. So trying to promote more books in Chinese, Malay and Tamil will always remain a big challenge. But one key part of it is also these books are not that readily available in Singapore, and the other challenge, obviously, is that the number of bookstores in Singapore has been going down. So trying to find books, you have to be more intentional about it. But then to find books in Chinese, Malay and Tamil is even more difficult.
04:50 Host, Loh Chin Ee
Promoting Singapore books means making sure that the books are available and easily accessible. As such, working with authors, publishers and booksellers to raise the visibility of and access to the books is crucial to sustain the local ecosystem.
05:07 William Phuan
We work with them in a very direct way. So for example, for the Singapore Literature Prize, when we announce the shortlisted writers and awards. We always provide a link for people to be able to buy the books online. Those links will bring them back to the booksellers' website so that they can buy the books and purchase the books online. And we also try to organise all these readings by the writers themselves, so then we have their books available for sale too.
05:32 Host, Loh Chin Ee
Another key component of accessibility is that of translation. Translating regional books into English, and getting Singapore books written in English translated into other languages, are part of the cultural work of the Singapore Book Council. Through translation, we have access to a wider range of books, which means exposure to different ways of looking at the world.
05:55 William Phuan
Sometimes in Singapore, we forget that there are other different languages, because everything is translated into English, or we use English as the main mode of communication. But let's say, if you go to a country like Vietnam or Philippines or even Indonesia, you see that a lot of the books in the bookstores have been translated into their local languages. So a lot of books from the US, from the UK, have been translated into Vietnamese, or into Tagalog, into Bahasa Indonesian. So that concept of translation is so important to them, right? So I think it's for us to really raise the awareness of translation to bridge some of these linguistic and cultural barriers, but actually to start more conversations, to look at, oh, this book is really interesting, how can I get it translated into my local market or you know, for the children in my community and vice versa as well? So I think translation is really a key part to bridging some of these gaps or chasms, but I think more importantly, it's really important to use it as a way to understand one another culturally and linguistically.
07:02 Host, Loh Chin Ee
Chapter Two: The National Book Development Board of the Philippines
Elsewhere in Asia, other government organisations are also set up to promote books and reading. Charisse Aquino-Tugade, Executive Director of the National Book Development Board of the Philippines, tells us how her organisation promotes Filipino books.
07:26 Charisse Aquino-Tugade
NBDB is National Book Development Board, and many people think that we develop books, but we don't. The Agency really just takes care of the industry. What we do is we grow the industry by providing incentives and government subsidies. We register everyone that is involved in the publishing value chain, so that starts from the creative whether you're an editor, an illustrator, an author, we register you, we register the publishers, we register the distributors. So everyone that's in part of that chain, and once we register them, we get them in our database, we are able to provide incentives. We provide grants, for example, for creatives, we give grants for manuscript, development, publication, translation to all the different Philippine languages. We also give grants for translation going out of the country, and we also provide education. We have a program called the book Institute, which I started in 2021 where we're upscaling all of our creators. That's the Creator side, and for the publisher side. obviously, we always want to increase market share in the Philippines. Our book sector is dominated by imported books. About 80% of the books that we have and that we read are imported, and we don't really have representation of our own culture on our own heritage. So that's what I'm trying to expand make sure that we have that, and we do that through number one – we subsidize paper importation. We don't really produce paper in the Philippines, we produce like the newsprint type of paper but we don't have paper mills anymore. We look for markets or create market spaces and connect publishers with large scale procurement. So if there is an organisation that wants to buy in bulk, then we connect them.
09:08 Host, Loh Chin Ee
The National Book Development Board thus serves as a match maker of sorts, at times, bringing together different parties to meet demand and supply needs in the book market. During the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020, Charisse decided to set up remote reading centres called book nooks in remote areas filled with Filipino-altered books. These book nooks have grown from 52 in 2021, to 103 in 2024.
09:39 Charisse Aquino-Tugade
So we decided to procure all of these Filipino authored books, and we set it up in these different reading centres, not libraries. We didn't do it in libraries, and the reason why we didn't do it is because our library culture is not like the library culture here. Our libraries and museums are still seen as colonial spaces, and Filipinos don't like anything quiet, like we can't have a quiet space. We need it loud...we need and, you know, we have a lot of children. It's not like other places where they have one child. So, you know, we have moms with seven children in the countryside. Seven children and they're all one after the other, so they won't enter a library. So I needed to put it in spaces that were accessible to people. So number one would be the marketplace. Not a grocery, but the outdoor markets where people would go and buy their vegetables and buy their fresh fish.
10:32 Host, Loh Chin Ee
Given that the Philippines has more than 110 ethnolinguistic groups, providing books that culturally resonate for each group is not easy. But ensuring representative books that speak to the different groups is a commitment of the board.
10:47 Charisse Aquino-Tugade
So there's a book nook in a place called Tagum in Davao, where it's in a mobile bus, and this bus goes around, and they do programming so kids can come in and pick up their book. We also have a book nook in a place called Tawi-Tawi, and it's kind of the furthest point. It's in the middle of nowhere, it's an island. They speak a very different language, I don't even understand it, but the children are so happy to have these books, because there's some books that are in their language. There's an area called Bataan, and in this area there's an indigenous group called the Aeta, the Negritos. We're Austronesian. Filipinos now are like Austronesian, but they look a little bit Melanesian. They look a little bit like the people of Papua, New Guinea, so they look very different from us, and they've been traditionally marginalised, and they're darker than I am. They have, they're very, very curly hair, and I remember I was unloading books. We had these boxes of books, so excited with the book nooks, I'm thinking, “oh, we have it in Filipino, you have it in Ilocano and all these languages,” and she was looking, she kept on looking at the books and, you know, looking, looking, and searching and I said, “what's she searching?” Then she tapped me, and she's like, “where's my book?” And I said, “oh, here, here, this is all for you.” And she said, “no, but where's my book? I don't see one for me, because there was no book that represented her.” And it, oh, it broke my heart, because, you know, publishing is a business, and no business has invested in her, and it just makes me so sad because we have so many different cultures. I'm more than 110 so how do we do that? We have to do it one book at a time. It's really engaging all of the younger writers and authors and illustrators to start doing work for this little girl.
12:38 Host, Loh Chin Ee
Chapter Three: Reading Festivals.
One way book organisations such as the Singapore Book Council and the National Book Development Board in the Philippines develop a vibrant reading and writing culture is to organise reading festivals, where like-minded individuals can come together as a community. The Asian Festival of children's content, an annual festival organised by the Singapore Book Council, is one such event.
13:08 William Phuan
AFCC started in 2010, but it started out in quite a different form, so we used to organise this Asian Children's and Illustrators Conference in Singapore. So that was a conference really meant for children's book writers, illustrators, translators in Singapore, because we realised that a lot of the books that children were reading back then from the west, from the UK. So our cultural references, or literary references, were you know, really a lot of books from the west. There was a distinct lack of content or books from this part of the world, from Singapore, and also to talk about stories that our children could relate to, you know, representation, identity, culture and so and so forth. So we ran that conference for a few years, and it grew and expanded until in 2010, we decided that, oh, it's time to expand it into a festival. So that's how the Asian Festival Children's Content came about in 2010 and we've been running it for 15 years since. So AFCC, there are two main components. One is the conference part, which is targeted at writers, illustrators, translators, publisher, so really craft, processed and driven. And the other part is educators and librarians. Practitioners are interested in using books in classrooms, or to use books to teach linguistic skills, literacy pedagogy, right? So that's one part of it. And then the other part is our public programs, so we have a book fair at AFCC, where we showcase a range of books from different publishers, also by the featured authors. So at the book fair, we also have book launches, performances, workshops that are targeted at children and their parents. So it's a way to bring all these different audiences and communities together to really discover the joy of reading and the joy of finding a book or discovering a new book.
14:58 Host, Loh Chin Ee
Such festivals promote a shared experience of reading, create opportunities for learning and open up spaces for meeting people who share the same interests.
15:09 William Phuan
It's so important to build that reading and writing community, because we always often look at reading or writing as a solo activity, but to know that you are actually a part of a community, right, they are like-minded people who share your concerns or share your joy or the pleasure of reading, to find that you're part of that community too, then to share the books that you're reading and recommend one another all these books or authors that you really love.
15:35 Host, Loh Chin Ee
This community includes Singapore's neighbours.
15:38 William Phuan
So we're looking at Singapore being in the nexus of being in Southeast Asia, being in Asia as well. We wanted to connect more with our literary partners, communities in Southeast Asia and also in Asia. The intent was always to encourage that intercultural flow, or cross-cultural flow, so that we can learn from one another, but also to get our books translated or made accessible in the different countries, in Southeast Asia, in Asia as well. So the regional outreach collaboration is a key part of AFCC.
16:10 William Phuan
There are many challenges in terms of linguistic and cultural barriers, but I think you'll find that there are many like-minded partners, people in each of these countries. They always want to connect with the neighbours, but don't really know how to do that. So I think it's really finding the like-minded partners, finding the right partners, to come up with a way to connect, to collaborate, and then to keep working at it, so that that form of partnership collaboration can continue.
16:40 William Phuan
So we need to create community, and we need to kind of have programs that are around our books. I think AFCC is important because it's not just a Singapore festival, it's a festival that celebrates Southeast Asian culture and that really brings us together.
17:00 Host, Loh Chin Ee
AFCC had to pivot to online and hybrid modes during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, AFCC was conducted fully online, and in 2022, a hybrid version was organised. Since 2023, AFCC has returned to fully physical mode, with the 2023 and 2024 festivals held at the Central Library in Singapore.
17:24 William Phuan
Now, in hindsight, having tried all these different iterations and approaches, I would say online, that was born out of necessity, right? But what we learned from it is that now people are really craving for that in-person, that interpersonal experience. So this year and last year, when we organised AFCC as a fully in-person festival, I think people were really happy to be back to meet their friends again, to bump into each other and then to hold a book in the book fair. So I think nothing builds that form of in-person experience, having that face-to-face interactions, and sometimes that casual chance that you bump into someone, and you make new friends. Online sessions, I feel they work best if you use it as a kind of an outreach or marketing, because it can reach more people from different countries at different time zones. I think as a form of outreach and marketing, it works best, but as a festival for the participants who gain the most from it, I think an in-person festival is probably the best way to go.
18:28 Host, Loh Chin Ee
To end this podcast, we asked some attendees at the 2024 AFCC to share their reasons for attending the festival.
18:08 Sui Yan
My name is Sui Yan, I curate programs, oral storytelling programs in museums and public spaces. I need to spark my imagination, and very often I need to create stories, so I'm here to absorb and be filled with ideas that I really need in my work.
18:34 Camille Phylana
Camille Phylana, a writer for Campfire Greats. I'm at the AFCC this year because I've been invited by the Philippine delegation to speak about the diaspora. I publish books, I write and design my own activity books for children who are living outside of the Philippines. So I'm really excited to be able to meet a lot of different content creators for children, because it's always been a passion for me, especially now that I'm a mom or a five-year-old and a seven-year-old.
19:28 Denise
My name is Denise, and I'm a bookseller. It's like a reunion where everyone who cares for children's literature and children, we're all gathering and chatting and being energised and exchanging ideas, so that's why we love doing the AFCC. Also, the other thing is, the children's publishing industry and content creation industry in Singapore is so young. Actually, the whole of Singapore is so young, right? So we need to hone and develop our skills and open our eyes and get perspective, so I think the festival is always great for that.
20:01 E Ling
My name is Yi Ling. I'm an educator and a writer.
20:04
It's just always been one of those events that you come to be refreshed, in terms of what's the latest trend in young adult fiction, and also just be in the midst of a community who loves books.
20:22 Host, Loh Chin Ee
Thank you for listening to the How We Read podcast episode, building a reading community. Charisse Aquino-Tugade shares more about her vision and work with the National Book Development Board in the Philippines in a bonus episode, if you would like to attend the Asian Festival of Children's Content, visit afcc.com.sg for more information.
This episode was written and hosted by me, Loh Chin Ee, and my thanks goes to all our guests and contributors from the 2024 Asian Festival of Children's Content. This episode was produced by Kenn Delbridge of SPLiCE Studios. Administrative support was provided by Koh Yu Qun. The Singapore Book Council provided funding and support for series two of the How We Read podcast. Swipe on the cover art to see show notes with links and references. We're available on all major podcast apps. Please subscribe to be notified of new episodes and take a moment to give us a five star review. For more information, please visit lohchinee.com.