The WORDSMITH

Singaporean author Amanda Lee Koe's books defy definition-as does their maker.

- CHANDREYEE RAY

When Amanda Lee Koe writes, she enters into a sort of fugue state. She sits at her computer screen, sipping habitually from a large carafe of cold black coffee. Her fingers fly across the keyboard. The hours stretch on.

“I usually lose track of time,” she says, describing her process. “It’s pleasurable and productive, but can also be quite disorienting and make you feel detached from reality.”

She pauses then pipes up again. “Writing is also quite sedentary, right? You feel exhausted at the end but you’ve barely moved. Maybe that’s why Murakami needs to run!”

We burst into laughter. Earlier in the conversation, we had been discussing an essay the novelist Haruki Murakami had once written for The New Yorker, where he explained how essential running had become to him for the way it balanced out the stillness of writing. (“Can’t relate,” we had joked.)

The practice of writing is full of contradictions, Lee Koe and I agree. Writing depletes and energises you like nothing else. It’s a cerebral art form—but at its best becomes completely visceral. “In that moment, you are no longer thinking about the construction of the story,” she says. “It feels like it’s just flowing out of your fingers.”

This instinctual way of working has defined Lee Koe’s trajectory as a writer. Her debut title, Ministry of Moral Panic, arrived in 2013 as a set of short stories exposing the underbelly of her native country.

For Lee Koe, it was an opportunity to offer her audience an elusive glimpse at the real Singapore—the writhing humanness that lay beneath its forced homogeneity, its veneer and its artificial gardens. For her readers, it was the first taste of an extraordinary new voice.