Hyderabad Literary Festival: Literature taking its first steps in Singapore

When Singapore was chosen as the guest nation for the ongoing sixth edition of the Hyderabad Literary Festival (HLF), a few eyebrows were raised. However, Singapore-based authors and poets who trooped into the city for the festival assert that the nation that was ‘culturally-barren’ in the past now has a budding literary scene.

While Singapore literature might only bring memories of authors facing the brunt of state authority, a few members of the fairly-young Singaporean literati, who spoke about the cultural aspirations of an ‘economically driven’ nation on the sidelines of the three-day festival, assure that things are about to change.