Epigram Books founder Edmund Wee is not letting cancer stop him from helping S’pore write its stories

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Edmund Wee, the founder of Epigram Books, is not letting cancer slow him down as he does all he can to promote Singapore literature.

 

Edmund Wee sees his career in 20-year cycles.

 

From the age of 20 to 40, he studied psychology, worked as a government psychologist, then became a journalist.

 

The work was similar, he says. “Your job is to interview people, find out their problems and then write about it.”

 

When he was 40, he left journalism for his second act. He started a design agency called Epigram which made a name for its bold, creative work. 

 

When he hit 60, he moved on to his third act. He launched Epigram Books and became a publisher. “Sixty was a nice time to start a new career and I thought I’d do it from 60 to 80.”

 

He set out to raise the bar on local book design and, more importantly, to champion Singapore literature, or SingLit for short.

 

In the decade or so since, his Epigram Books imprint has published about 400 works, including general fiction, picture books, middle-grade novels and graphic novels. Nearly all are set in Singapore, with a few set in South-east Asia. 

 

He also opened a bookshop selling only books about Singapore, by Singapore writers or published in Singapore.

 

Mr Wee, who turns 72 in June, has added tremendously to the oeuvre of stories about Singapore. The Epigram Books Fiction Prize he introduced in 2015 has also surfaced literary gems in a country where literature – let alone home-grown literature – doesn’t feel particularly valued.

 

I’m meeting the publisher and CEO at Dolcetto, a small Italian bakery and bistro at the lobby of the Conrad Singapore Orchard in Cuscaden Road.

 

Back when I joined The Straits Times in the 1980s, Mr Wee was already an editor there. He was known to push the envelope in the way stories were covered, and I remember how thrilling it was to be part of his team doing special sections to mark National Day. His energy was infectious, his ideas pretty wild and his design strong.

 

I’ve not seen him in the last two decades, but he is exactly as I remember him: shaven head, black, round-framed glasses and a generally cynical air tempered by sudden impish grins.

 

He orders a truffle burrata pizza and I opt for an egg pasta.

 

He tells me straight off that he has stage 3 prostate cancer.

 

He found out he had cancer in July 2022 during an annual medical check-up. An operation scheduled for November that year was postponed while he sought a second, then a third, opinion. The operation was carried out in February 2023.

 

“By the time I went for the operation, the doctors said, ‘Oh, the cancer has spread to the lymph nodes as well as other places’. They had to cut out more,” he says, matter-of-factly.

 

“Stage 4 is supposed to be terminal, so stage 3 is not terminal, there is hope.”

 

He adds: “The diagnosis is, if I’m unlucky, I have four years, if I’m lucky, I have 12 years. The doctor more or less said that. I told myself, ‘Twelve years, four years, in between it’s eight years. I’m 72. Okay, lah, 80 years old, time to die. It’s enough’.”

 

He says he wasn’t devastated by the diagnosis as both his parents had died of cancer. “I’ve always felt that cancer was part of the family and when I got it, okay, this is life,” he says with a shrug. “I don’t expect to live to 100 or even 90, I’ve always felt 80 was enough.”

 

He feels, and looks, well and goes for regular hormone therapy injections. They cause side effects like hot flushes. “You don’t have hair falling out. Not that I care. I’m botak.”

 

What has changed since his diagnosis is that he now leaves work earlier. 

 

Even during the Covid-19 pandemic, he would go to his office in Toa Payoh North every day and work till nine or 10 at night. He now leaves at 6pm. His wife, Ms Tan Wang Joo, was a former editor at The Straits Times and editor of Her World magazine. They have two grown-up children: a daughter and a son.

 

Most important book

 

Mr Wee was born in 1952, the second of two boys and two girls, and grew up in a Singapore Improvement Trust flat in Princess Elizabeth Estate near Bukit Batok.

 

His father was a cleaner in a factory who later set up a small company to sell second-hand machine spare parts. The business eventually went bankrupt. His mother was a housewife.

 

He went to Princess Elizabeth Estate School and then Raffles Institution (RI). He stayed in RI for his pre-university studies, and was part of the Raffles Players theatre group.

 

He received a Colombo Plan scholarship to study psychology at New Zealand’s University of Waikato, then a new university, in Hamilton on the North Island. He was the only one of his siblings to make it to university.

 

He chose psychology because it was a relatively new subject and New Zealand because a prominent professor was at Waikato. It was his first trip abroad and his parents got a suit made for him.

 

In his first year there, he read a novel that changed his life – The Fountainhead, by Russian-born American author Ayn Rand.

 

The plot revolves around an architect who decides to bomb a building he designed when it wasn’t built to his specifications.

 

“When I read it, I said, ‘Wow, this is how one should live a life’,” Mr Wee says.

 

“Not to the extreme of bombing a building, but what I took away from it was you cannot live your life and have your principles compromised every day,” he says.

 

“You should try to live a life that has meaning, that leaves some legacy, and be true to your beliefs. I would say I’ve tried to live my life that way ever since. Whether it’s been good or bad for me, I do not know.”

 

He spent much of his university days working with people on the fringes of society, such as drug addicts and runaways, and received a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in psychology, specialising in criminology.

 

He did his national service as a psychology officer in the Ministry of Defence and later worked at the Ministry of Home Affairs researching secret society gangsters.

 

After four years, he joined The Straits Times, which paid off the remainder of his bond. He was among an early batch of “mid-career” joiners with the newspaper and wrote editorials. Bored with this, he did reporting, then editing, and later headed the design and photo departments, areas he did not have training in but had a natural affinity for.

 

By 1991, he felt he had progressed as far as he could go in the newsroom. He struck out to start Epigram, working out of his bedroom for the first two years. He found a niche reimagining company annual reports to, as he once said, “reflect the company’s spirit”, and the business did well.

 

His work won many design awards and he was named a Designer of the Year in the 2008 President’s Design Award. “I thought, ‘okay, this is as far as you can go in design’.”

 

Championing SingLit

 

Around that time, company annual reports were heading towards the CD-ROM format, which he wasn’t doing. He wasn’t keen to branch into other design work such as branding either. 

 

By then, he had published a book by mountaineer David Lim and started on The Diary Of Amos Lee, a children’s book series by Adeline Foo.

 

“I said to my staff: ‘You can do all these great annual reports, you win awards, but who remembers them? And what difference do they make? If we really want to make a difference, it must be a book. If you publish a great book, it lives on forever.’”

 

He made the switch to SingLit, and quickly realised he needed volume.

 

“If you want to make a difference, you really must do a lot of books. You cannot just do two or three books a year. That’s ridiculous. After 10 years, you’d have done 20 books.”

 

While there were Singapore poetry and short stories, there was a dearth of novels, which was why he launched the Epigram Books Fiction Prize in 2015. 

 

The winner gets $25,000 and three finalists get $5,000 each. He coughed up some of the money himself and got sponsors such as foundations and individuals. The prize is an advance against royalties the writers get when their books are sold.

 

The manuscripts started coming. While the majority do not get published, the prize got Singaporeans writing. (His tip to writers is to remember the letter P: to get published, you need a good plot, good prose and an unforgettable protagonist.)

 

He regards SingLit as stories about Singapore rather than stories written by Singaporeans. “The definition should be about the content and not the author.”

 

There is growing awareness and support for SingLit, he says. When he started the bookshop selling local books at URA Centre in 2019, “we had enough business not to lose money”. The shop is now at the Singapore Art Museum in Tanjong Pagar Distripark.

 

That said, he remembers a customer asking if he had local books “the equivalent of Ernest Hemingway”.

 

“Come on, lah,” Mr Wee snorts. “I wanted to say, ‘You know, 90 per cent of the books in America are not the standard of Ernest Hemingway’.”

 

He continues: “The very best of fiction in England of course will be better than the very best of Singapore. But are you saying then we don’t publish? It doesn’t make sense, right? I would say a lot of books published in the West aren’t very great anyway.”

 

The market in Singapore is tiny. “Every book you publish, you need to sell between 3,000 and 5,000 copies to break even, and most books we sell 1,000. If you’re lucky, 2,000.”

 

When writers become successful, they get picked up by international publishers for their next books. He doesn’t blame them for jumping ship.

 

In 2016, he took a bank loan to open an Epigram Books arm in London with the aim of getting a Singapore book on the longlist of the prestigious Man Booker Prize. He didn’t succeed, and stopped publishing in Britain in 2021.

 

“I found that the book trade was very old boy, very racist. I started questioning: ‘Why am I trying to sell my Singapore books to the whites? They’re not interested in my story, set in Singapore.’”

 

He turned his attention to South-east Asia, expanding the Epigram Books prize to South-east Asian writers in English, and banking on the readership in this part of the world. He maintains a staff of about 15.

 

So why are you doing this, I ask. Why are you championing SingLit?

 

He is puzzled by the question.

 

“Why not?” he says at last.

 

“Literature is so important,” he says. “Countries and people coalesce around famous characters and famous novels. If you’re in England, you talk about Romeo and Juliet, you talk about Pip, Oliver Twist. In the United States, you talk about Tom Sawyer. There is common understanding about characters and values. In Singapore, we don’t have this.”

 

He laments how “the only story we have is, Singapore is small and vulnerable”. He believes “there must be more” and that there are stories to be told set against the island’s rich history which goes back hundreds of years.

 

His favourite Epigram book is Sonny Liew’s graphic novel The Art Of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, which sold about 35,000 copies in Singapore, won numerous awards and has been translated into several languages. His best-selling books are from The Diary Of Amos Lee series. They have sold 200,000 copies, including in China.

 

He has high praise for Rachel Heng’s The Great Reclamation, Amanda Lee Koe’s Ministry Of Moral Panic, Balli Kaur Jaswal’s Sugarbread and Sebastian Sim’s Let’s Give It Up For Gimme Lao!

 

What does he make of Kevin Kwan’s popular Crazy Rich Asians?

 

He laughs. “I don’t think it’s a great novel but it’s written in a very entertaining, readable way and I’m glad it became successful. It’s always nice to read stories about people you don’t know.”

 

Would you have published it? 

 

“Yes, of course,” he says. “I’m not a publisher who says, ‘Oh, I must only publish books about the middle class or the poor’.”

 

He wishes there was more support given to publishers and bookshops, even though they are commercial outfits. The authorities must look at the whole reading ecosystem, he says.

 

It’s great how Singapore has a super network of libraries, but if people stopped buying books, publishers would go out of business, and where would libraries get their future supply, he asks. “Okay, you can buy foreign books but you will have no local books. So a very, very successful library will portend its own death,” he argues.

 

He sighs. “I’m not a young man trying to make my first million or trying to make a career. Why not do something that is meaningful, that can leave a good legacy if it’s successful, and do something good?”

 

Does he have a book inside him?

 

He has more than one in his head and is always mulling over killer opening sentences. In fact, he keeps a record in his phone of the opening line of every book he has read, as well as the last sentence “to remember that I have finished the book”.

 

But he’s too much of a perfectionist to write a novel, he says. It’ll take him five years to produce one and he’d rather be publishing 50 books a year, he declares. “In five years, it’ll be more important for those 250 books to be out there than for my one book to be out there.”

 

As we wrap up, he tells me that he actually has thought about his fourth act. 

 

“If I can live beyond 80, I’ll become a chef,” he grins.

 

“I love cooking and experimenting with food. I find it quite creative thinking of how to combine flavours, then making the food look decorative on a plate. I’d like that.”

 

I can’t wait to be invited to lunch with him then.

 

 

Source: The Straits Times © SPH Media Limited. Reproduced with permission.

 

 

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