Daren Shiau

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.

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".

He is regarded as one of the ‘Class of 95’, the pre-digital literary wave of Singapore writers which includes Boey Kim Cheng, Heng Siok Tian, Yong Shu Hoong and Alvin Pang.

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.

Daren Shiau, BBM, PBM (Chinese: 萧维龙, born 1971), is a Singaporean novelist, poet, conservationist, and lawyer in private practice qualified in Singapore, England and Wales.

He is an author of five books.

Shiau was born in Singapore in 1971, and is 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.

The book received the Singapore Literature Prize Commendation Award in 1998, together with Alfian Sa'at's Corridor.

Shiau is the author of Heartland (1999), Peninsular: Archipelagos and Other Islands (2000), and Velouria (2007).

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 2005, Shiau was first runner-up in the Golden Point Award creative writing competition for his short story, Take Your Wings Off, I Say.

Undeterred, he further truncated the story into a piece of microfiction which then anchored Velouria.

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”.

Poet Cyril Wong comments of Velouria that its “prose shards… seep into the heart like novels condensed into short films or poetry”.

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.

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

In the same year, Shiau received the top prize in The Straits Times’ inaugural microfiction competition with his story ‘Sedimentary’.

He is also a co-editor of Coast (2010), a seminal mono-titular anthology.

On the editorial front, Shiau co-edited with Lee Wei Fen in 2010, an experimental anthology, Coast: A Mono-titular Anthology of Singapore Writing, which featured over 50 creative works by both published and unpublished writers across a single title.

Writers included Goh Poh Seng, Lee Tzu Pheng, Eric Khoo, Toh Hsien Min, Cyril Wong, Alfian Sa’at and Pooja Nansi.

Literary critic, Dr Gwee Li Sui, has described Coast as "nothing short of a manifesto, a call to stretch out the tent poles of language and go in search of an idiom for making destiny".

Shiau has been invited to read in New York, Boston and London.

He has been a guest writer at the Melbourne Writers Festival, and the Hong Kong International Literary Festival.

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, 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.

A year after Heartland was published, Shiau released a poetry collection, Peninsular: Archipelagos and Other Islands. Poems from Peninsular have been included in several international and Singapore anthologies.

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".

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.

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.

Shiau has served as a writing mentor for the Creative Arts Programme administered by the Ministry of Education, and the National Arts Council's Mentor Access Project.

In 2021, Shiau was appointed co-chair of the Singapore Writers Festival's advisory panel.

At the National University of Singapore, Shiau was one of the first chairmen of the pioneering sustainability and environmental activism NGO, Students Against Violation of the Earth (SAVE).

SAVE was involved in climate change advocacy, as well as biodiversity protection and reforestation efforts in Singapore in the Nineties.

‘Sedimentary’ was included in the 2017 reprint of Velouria.

The title story of the book is named after a track by Boston-based alternative rock band, the Pixies.

Other stories in the volume were named after songs by artistes such as My Bloody Valentine and Thelonious Monk.