Ovidia Yu: from “Authors pick thriller, detective genres for debutbooks” | The Hindu — Business Line

“Ovidia Yu a novelist, short-story writer and playwright whose debut detective novel “Miss Moorthy Investigates” first published in 1989 was released in India recently by Westland books says that be it fiction or nonfiction the genre has all the elements which an author or a reader could ask for.

“Death, murder, crime, curiosity, fear all of them blended together with focus on minute details offers unmatchable thrilling experience to the author. Once a debut author gets that kind of satisfaction it boosts his confidence to experiment with other genres as well,” she says.

However, Ovidia believes that writing detective and thriller stories for books is a different experience than writing for plays.

“While writing plays the author has to keep in mind that the curiosity and fear has not be generated from the writing alone, there is a director too to take control of the characters and the plot, whereas while writing a book its only between the author and editor, so there is more creative freedom,” she says.”

from The Hindu, Business Line

Gilbert Koh - Poems Here And There

“Didn't write much at all in 2012. But the world around me recycled some of my old poems and they got a new breath of life. Recording my poetic momentos [sic] for 2012 here:

PROJECT LAVA

This month, I was mentioned on the Straits Times' front page. Not only on the front page, but in the headline article. Nice publicity for the literary arts:

This was about the National Art Council's Project Lava. The idea was to pair up a visual artist with a poem, and have the artist create something based on his interpretation of the poem.

In my case, the artist was Sonny Liew (who has previously illustrated Iron Man for Marvel Comics - how cool!) who created a very large mural (16 x 4 metres) at Punggol Waterway. The mural incorporates an old poem of mine Accident. More details in the follow-up article in the ST's Life! section.”

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