These stories are (Sing)Lit

A couple’s cat leaves offerings of dead birds. A woman is craving croissants. A young diver hunts venomous cone snails for a lovelorn researcher. These stories and more in The Angel Tiger and Other Stories offer readers a vivid palette of human experiences, a collection which Assoc Prof Sherwood describes as “a mixed bag of flavours” and “as suggestive and ambiguous as life itself”.

Explaining his creative process, Assoc Prof Sherwood says research and teaching go hand in hand, and that teaching enriches his writing. “I was working on ‘Concert Hall’, a short story in the book about a Bangladeshi migrant worker in Singapore who loves to sing. At the time, I was also teaching a graduate creative writing workshop at NTU. One of my students in the workshop was volunteering with an association that helps migrant workers. The insights he shared about their lives and values were worth more than all the research I’d done previously.”

The 13 stories in the collection were written over the course of a decade or more. I’d given up on publishing some of them because, in my opinion, they weren’t very good. When the opportunity arose to create a collection, I went back to them and saw how they could be improved. Some projects need all your immediate force; some need to be left to sit for a while. Sorting out which is which is what keeps me on my toes.

–  Assoc Prof Sherwood

In Tiger Girls, writer Felicia Low-Jimenez and illustrator Claire bring to life a diverse cast of strong female characters who confront misogyny in a dystopian world shaped by the unique tropical landscapes of Southeast Asia.

When she first enrolled in ADM, Claire wanted to study film. As she explored different art forms, including taking a graphic storytelling course, her interest shifted to design and illustration. For her final-year project, she created a slice-of-life graphic novel series.

“ADM exposes you early to everything from art history to modern art, which changes your palette – how you perceive art creation and the thought process behind it. That still influences my work today, whether it’s design or illustration.”

Tiger Girls is making waves globally. It won Best Graphic Novel and Best Marketing Campaign at the Singapore Book Awards 2026 and was part of the 2025 White Ravens list of international children’s and youth literature. It is also set to be published in other countries and languages.

I pursued a day job first, so I could have a stable income and the freedom to choose projects that interested me, without financial considerations being the main driving force behind my decisions. To me, learning is valuable in itself, so I focused on projects that explored techniques, mediums and themes I hadn’t tried before.

–  Claire

When Ria, a young Medusa, inadvertently turns an entire village into stone, she and her sister flee to an underground settlement populated by marginalised non-humans. There, she becomes their gatekeeper, until her friendship with a man from above threatens the city she swore to protect.

More than just a page-turner, this award-winning fantasy novel is an insightful exploration of race, gender and class in Manticura, a fictional island nation modelled on Singapore.

Dr Nuraliah wrote the first draft of her novel while doing her PhD in creative writing here. “Writing within a programme in NTU gave me opportunities to meet other authors and see how they work,” she says. Learning from writers working in different forms also refined her craft. For instance, her PhD supervisors, a poet and a playwright, attuned her to the subtleties of language, including sound and rhythm.

Between 3pm and 4pm, on days when I was in my school’s graduate office, I would walk to canteen one for yuan yang and a slice of papaya. It was often on these walks that I worked out continuity issues, plot problems and character development. We often think of big ‘aha’ moments when it comes to writing, but inspiration often comes from the mundane, no matter how fantastical the subject matter.

–  Dr Nuraliah

Crispin’s poetry collection explores themes of mixed race, bilingualism and the complexities of living in a society still framed by the Chinese-Malay-Indian-Others model of race.

The former President of Epiphany, NTU’s English and drama society, Crispin credits his literature education in university for his development as a writer and connection with the wider literary community. “Not only was I exposed to writing from diverse cultural backgrounds, I learnt to integrate academic research into creative writing,” he says.

He put this into practice while researching the colonial history of the Portuguese as well as the history of the Eurasians in Singapore for his book. The research helped shape his exploration of how mixed-race people continue to experience the effects of colonialism.

Writing this book was a way to articulate my identity as a mixed-race person on my terms. I hope that the book encourages everyone to explore their own identities and to embrace the complex and beautiful messiness of themselves.

–  Crispin