SINGAPORE – Five-time Singapore Writers Festival (SWF) director Pooja Nansi has been picked for the 2023 Power List for the exceptional job she has done restoring excitement to the annual literary tent-pole event.
Coming into the high-profile role in 2019 at age 37 – the youngest to do so since the position was created in 2010 – Nansi turned doubters into believers after she took the festival in a radically new direction.
With her brio and open-mindedness, she transformed the pinnacle event for local writers and readers to become more all-encompassing and generous, through inviting community and youth curators on board and a willingness to embrace a wide range of topics – even hosting panels on memes and K-pop.
Tapping her roots in the spoken word tradition, she paired a fierce insistence on challenging – or, more accurately, disregarding – literary hierarchies with her eclectic interests to inject a titillating unpredictability into the 26-year-old festival.
It is a turn that particularly resonated with youth aged between 13 and 18, which have become her most ardent supporters.
As she hands over the reins to poet Yong Shu Hoong in 2024, the SWF is arguably in the strongest position it has ever been, its longevity assured, bucking trends of ageing literary fairs reported elsewhere, from Indonesia to Australia to Britain.
The Arts House Limited has not released the number of attendees at her swansong edition this year, themed Plot Twist and held in November. But her three-weekend post-Covid-19 edition in 2022 drew 46,000 people – proof of a maverick director successfully bestowing on an erudite festival a sheen of cool.
A look back on Nansi’s five years would evoke a slew of highlights, but her unabashed spotlighting of music and spoken-word crossovers in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of hip-hop in 2023 might be the most memorable. She is a self-professed hip-hop fanatic, and the niche programming is a testament to the confidence she has accrued over the five years.
Her invitations in the same edition of hip-hop historian Jeff Chang and record producer Susan Rogers are part of her democratic philosophy to elevate all forms of writing. This has included picking fashion designer and reality TV series Queer Eye (2018 to present) co-host Tan France as one of her headliners in 2021, and 2023’s standout speaker, Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a post-colonial academic and activist.
The retention of mainstream literary hard-hitters, such as English author Jeanette Winterson and Korean-American novelist Min Jin Lee, author of family history epic Pachinko (2017), has also been accompanied by a non-judgmental inclusion of BookTok-famous authors, who have been greeted with equal, if not more, fanfare.
Asian-American writers Chloe Gong and Dustin Thao were given the prime Victoria Theatre space in 2022’s edition. And this year, Singaporean participants got to meet “Internet librarian” Jack Edwards in person before he hosted the Booker Prize ceremony in November.
Nansi has done all this while making little of breaking conventional barriers of race and gender, being the first non-Chinese and the first woman to head SWF, while taking in her stride a once-in-a-generation pandemic – a severe blow to a festival that runs primarily on physical connections, but one that might have been fatal with a lesser director in charge.
In the same five years, Nansi became a mother, restaged her one-woman show You Are Here at Wild Rice@Funan to a sold-out crowd and saw her poetry collection We Make Spaces Divine shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize.
As she takes some much-deserved rest before returning to her personal projects and continuing with her PhD, one eagerly anticipates the magnitude of creative force she has yet to unleash.
The arrow is nocked, the bow drawn and many are watching.
