Why did Singapore writers festival bar a Singlish novel on girls looking for white western husbands?

Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan isn’t complaining, and she certainly wouldn’t call the Singapore Writers Festival blur, which is Singlish for dumb. The author of Sarong Party Girls, probably the world’s first novel written entirely in Singapore’s patois Singlish, has been rebuffed by the festival this year, even though she’s previously been welcomed by it and remains generously supported by Singapore’s National Arts Council, the government agency behind it.

In fact, NAC (indulging Singapore’s fondness for three letter acronyms) supported Tan’s trip to the Ubud Writers Festival in Bali late last month and the Hong Kong International Literary Festival, where she’s appearing this week. In between, Tan – who left home for college at Northwestern outside Chicago two decades ago and has stayed in the United States since – stopped in Singapore, where her publisher, William Morrow, set up a book launch and other events.

“We booked these events in spring, and at the time, we didn’t know that the festival would be happening at the exact same time,” Tan says. The publisher’s subsequent efforts to get Tan into the festival were rebuffed. Singapore Writers Festival didn’t respond to questions by our deadline.

Tan’s homecoming could hardly be better from a popularity standpoint. Sarong Party Girls repeated at number three last week on Singapore’s Sunday Times bestseller list, where it first appeared in August. “Nine weeks on our fiction bestsellers list for a Singaporean author is unprecedented,” Leslie Lim Boon Hup of book distributor Pansing says. “And we are still counting!”