Daren Shiau

Emeritus Professor Edwin Thumboo wrote an essay about Peninsular titled 'Time and Place: History and Geography in Daren Shiau’s Poetry' in which he commented: "The incisive revelations of Shiau's work begin with the significance and the reach of his themes.... Interrelated and overlapping, they explain both the intrinsic unity of his work and – for me at least – its importance in the present overall balance of Singapore literature in English".

An editorial on Shiau’s writing on poetry.sg notes that his “wry observational poetry is transposed into [his] later collection of microfiction, Velouria, which also maintains the elegiac quality of poetry, while combining the compression and suggestiveness of poetic language with the broader narrative and character developments afforded by prose”.[2]

The Singapore literature platform, poetry.sg, observes in its ‘Critical Introduction’ to Shiau: “Shiau’s first collection of poetry, Peninsular, encapsulates through its structure and its themes the dual concerns of history and spatiality in his writing, which began early on in Heartland (both the original collection of poetry and the final publication conceived as a novel), and which persists in later work such as Velouria.[1]

Shiau was subsequently appointed as Director on the independently-managed Singapore Environment Council, and as Board Member of the National Parks Board, a statutory board of Singapore's Ministry of National Development. He has also been named an international expert of the Commission on Environmental Law of the (IUCN) in Switzerland. In 2016, Shiau was appointed to the Management Committee of the Garden City Fund, an Institute of Public Character in Singapore which complements the National Parks Board's greening and biodiversity conservation efforts.

In 2016, Shiau was conferred the Public Service Medal (Pingat Bakti Masyarakat) by the President of the Republic of Singapore.

Shiau has volunteered actively in the community, particularly in the Central Singapore District. Over the years, he has been appointed by the Singapore Government and the private sector to sit on various national-level committees relating to the arts, education and conservation. This includes working and focus groups of the Committee on the Future Economy (2016), the Urban Redevelopment Authority's Concept Plan Review Committee (both in 2011 and 2001), and the Singapore 21 Committee (1997).

In 2015, Heartland was selected by The Business Times as one of the Top 10 English Singapore books from 1965 to 2015, alongside titles by Arthur Yap, Goh Poh Seng and Philip Jeyaretnam. In the same year, MediaCorp commissioned the adaptation of Heartland into a telemovie directed by K Rajagopal. Heartland, the telemovie, was broadcast in August 2015.

His works have also been translated into several languages, namely Italian, German, Chinese, Malay, Tamil, and have been featured in cross-discipline public performances by other artists. In 2015, Shiau collaborated with indie band Riot in Magenta to present a performance at the Esplanade Recital Studio as part of the Singapore Writers Festival.

On the editorial front, Shiau co-edited with Lee Wei Fen in 2010, an experimental anthology, Coast, which featured creative works by published and unpublished writers across a single title.

Shiau is a member of the founding Board of Directors for Crest Secondary School, the first Specialised School for Normal (Technical) students in Singapore, which was announced by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong during his National Day Rally speech in 2010.

Velouria is a seminal collection of Singaporean microfiction, published by Shiau in 2007.

In 2005, Shiau was first runner-up in the Golden Point Award creative writing competition for his short story, Take Your Wings Off, I Say. An excerpt of the story appears as the last piece in Velouria.

The Japanese community in Singapore recognised Shiau's contributions to civic education by conferring on him the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry (JCCI) Foundation Education Award in 2003.

He received the Young Artist Award (Literature) from the National Arts Council in 2002.

Shiau has also published a trade monograph, Communication and the Environment (2000).

Shiau is the author of Heartland (1999), Peninsular: Archipelagos and Other Islands (2000), and Velouria (2007). He is also a co-editor of Coast (2010), a seminal mono-titular anthology.

Shiau's first work, Heartland is an existential novel. It deals with the paradox of rootedness and rootlessness of Singaporeans born after the Japanese Occupation. The book received the Singapore Literature Prize Commendation Award in 1998, together with Alfian Sa'at's Corridor. Heartland was named by Singapore's English daily The Straits Times in December 1999, along with J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, as one of the 10 Best Books of the Year. In 2007, an academic edition of Heartland was adopted into a textbook for Singapore secondary schools offering English literature in their GCE O-Level curriculum.

In 1993, Shiau, then a sophomore undergraduate, led SAVE in organising Water for Somalia, a project to raise funds for building water pipelines for Kenyan and Ethiopian refugees. It was the largest national recycling effort at that time, and received recognition and praise by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. in Geneva.

For his outstanding contributions to preservation of the local environment, Shiau was awarded the inaugural Green Leaf Award, the predecessor to the President's Award for the Environment, in 1993.

In 1993, he was selected by The Straits Times on Singapore's National Day as one of "50 Faces to Watch". A decade later in 2003, he was again named by The Straits Times on National Day as one of "38 Singaporeans Who Make a Difference to Singapore".

At the National University of Singapore, Shiau was one of the first chairmen of the environmental activism NGO Students Against Violation of the Earth (SAVE). SAVE was involved in coastal clean-up and reforestation efforts in the 1990s, and spearheaded the university's campus-wide recycling programme.

Shiau was born in Singapore in 1971, and of Hakka and Peranakan grandparentage. He was educated at Raffles Institution, Raffles Junior College, and graduated from the Law Faculty of the National University of Singapore on the Dean's List in 1996.

Travel guide Lonely Planet: Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei has cited Shiau as the author of the "definitive Singapore novel", and The Arts Magazine had described Shiau as "among the most exciting of the post-1965 generation of writers".

A Fulbright scholar, and an alumnus of the East-West Center in Honolulu established by the United States Congress in 1960, Shiau was the Visiting Writer in Fall 2003 to the University of California, Berkeley (Centre for Southeast Asian Studies).