Novelist Hwee Hwee Tan uses dialogue the way Bach used melodic lines, weaving disparate elements for the sheer fun of it—she blends the ancient and modern, Singaporean and British, high culture and low. She has an ear for human speech, the way it betrays our histories, governs our present encounters, and shapes what we become. Yet for all her modernity and edge, she’s not slick. She writes stories with heart, stories that grapple with ethical and spiritual dilemmas. She writes with humor, grace, and a refreshing frankness about belief. Keep your eye on her.
Some of Tan’s work is featured in Image issue 28 and issue 30.
Biography
Hwee Hwee Tan grew up in Singapore and the Netherlands. She studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia. She published her first novel, Foreign Bodies (Penguin), at age twenty-two, while still a graduate student at the University of Oxford. She received her MFA in Creative Writing at New York University, where she won the New York Times Fellowship for Fiction. She now lives in Singapore.
Current Projects
August 2001
“I’m working on a screenplay and a third novel. It’s going to feature a Singaporean, a European and an American, and follows their lives and their loves as they traverse three continents.”