Ten Year Series is an editorial imprint managed by Sing Lit Station and published by Math Paper Press, specialising in poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction by Singaporean authors. It seeks to apply Singapore-style structural discipline to the making of a manuscript. Founded in 2015, the Ten Year Series imprint primarily selects work that has workshopped and forged in the crucible of Manuscript Bootcamp, an intensive editorial programme that provides input and feedback from publishers, academics, editors, journalists and writers prior to publication.
The logo was conceived and designed by the two-woman graphic design studio Sarah and Schooling. An ardent supporter of Singapore’s literary scene, the studio is actively involved in designing books and publications across multiple genres, as well as other creative disciplines such as visual identity and branding, art directing, editorial design, web design, copywriting, and conducting workshops.
Hot Off The Press
We are proud to announce that Samuel Lee, author of A Field Guide to Supermarkets in Singapore, is now the recipient of the 2018 Singapore Literature Prize in English Poetry! Kudos to Amanda Chong's Professions as well for being shortlisted for the same award, and for entering a second print run in mid-2019.
Poetry, 71 pages
Published by Math Paper Press, 2016
Synopsis:
Caterwaul is a memoir — is scrapbook — is a wall of sound. Caterwaul chronicles the dramas of a poorly poet in circumstances beyond her control. Illustrated with visual snippets of the poet's childhood in Serangoon Gardens, Jennifer Anne Champion maps pain and desire across middle-class suburbia, in a contest to be heard against the poetry of the heartlands.
About the Author:
Jennifer Anne Champion is a writer, educator and archivist. She works freelance to accommodate teaching performance poetry and creative writing in public schools and collaborations with institutions such as Word Forward, the National Arts Council, and the Ministry of Education. She co-founded the online archive project and educational resource poetry.sg, and now serves as its Multimedia Poetry Editor.
Jennifer Anne Champion is a writer and performance poet. She has been described by Juice Magazine as gifted with “swift, animated style”. Champion has also performed her work in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Israel. In 2015, she released her first solo work of poetry – A History of Clocks (Redwheelbarrow Books, 2015). Caterwaul (Math Paper Press, 2016) is her latest collection of poems.
Poetry, 61 pages
Published by Math Paper Press, 2016
Shortlisted for the 2018 Singapore Literature Prize (English Poetry)
Synopsis:
At the very start of us, I foresaw
every possible ending.
Professions is a poet's directory of heartbreak. The backbone of this collection is a cycle of fractured relationships, where professional preoccupations tear lovers apart as distrust and incomprehension brew. Set against this are glimpses of indestructible intimacy — between a mother, a granddaughter, and a friend.
Amanda Chong's poems observe the doomed practice of the heart: solitary experiences, never fully nor mutually understood until too late.
About the Author:
Amanda Chong is a lawyer trained in Cambridge and Harvard, who writes poems on her lunch breaks. A winner of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, her poetry has been engraved on the Marina Bay Helix Bridge and included in the Cambridge International GCSE syllabus. Her writing has appeared in Monocle, the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, The Straits Times and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore.
Amanda Chong is a lawyer trained in Cambridge and Harvard, who writes poems on her lunch breaks. A winner of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, her poetry has been engraved on the Marina Bay Helix Bridge and included in the Cambridge International GCSE syllabus. Her writing has appeared in Monocle, the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, the Straits Times and QLRS. Professions (Math Paper Press, 2016) is her first collection of poems, and was shortlisted for the 2018 Singapore Literature Prize in English Poetry.
Poetry, 61 pages
Published by Math Paper Press, 2016
Shortlisted for the 2018 Singapore Literature Prize (English Poetry)
Synopsis:
A Field Guide to Supermarkets in Singapore is a 19th century reference book (on philology? art history? anthropology? nobody remembers) that fell into a tropical swamp and was rescued, then lovingly restored, by a nice lady in curlers.
Caked in organic matter too dense to scrub off, the pages of Samuel Lee's debut collection reveal visions and premonitions of a city filled with characters engaged in their own private sorrows, both minute and expansive. To read him is to be lost in the aisles of millennia.
About the Author:
Samuel Lee's writing has been published in A Luxury We Cannot Afford (Math Paper Press, 2014) and the Yale Literary Magazine, and has also been adapted for a choral work by Eric Banks. His is a member of the young poets' collectives Image-Symbol Department and Burn After Reading (Singapore).
Samuel Lee is the author of A Field Guide to Supermarkets in Singapore (Math Paper Press, 2016), which received the 2018 Singapore Literature Prize in English Poetry. His writing has been published in A Luxury We Cannot Afford (Math Paper Press, 2014) and the Yale Literary Magazine, and has also been adapted for a choral work by Eric Banks. He is a member of the Image–Symbol Department and Burn After Reading (Singapore).
Poetry, 65 pages
Published by Math Paper Press, 2016
Synopsis:
Change is what happens to everything: history is humanity's attempt to make sense of this inevitability. In his debut collection of poetry, Daryl Lim Wei Jie paints minute strokes that give way to panoramas, strewn with unusual asides: migrants crossing oceans; an ancient king reclaiming a throne; rivers clogged with corpses; the paperwork for an invasion; a milo dinosaur the height of Mount Everest. A Book of Changes is a young poet's attempt to make sense of the impossible ebb and flow of time.
About the Author:
Daryl Lim Wei Jie is a poet and critic, who read history at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, with a focus on intellectual history and political thought. He is particularly interested in the literary uses of history. Lim's work has appeared in QLRS, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Ceriph, POSKOD.SG, Drunken Boat and Softblow, and his poetry has been anthologised in A Luxury We Cannot Afford (Math Paper Press, 2015) and elsewhere. His work has won him the Golden Point Award in English Poetry in 2015.
Daryl Lim Wei Jie is a poet and critic. He read history at the University of Oxford, and has a Master's in Political Thought and Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge. He is particularly interested in the literary uses of history. His work has won him the Golden Point Award in English Poetry in 2015. His work has also appeared in the QLRS, Ceriph, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Ceriph, POSKOD.SG, Drunken Boat and Softblow. A Book of Changes (Math Paper Press, 2016) is his first collection of poems.
Poetry, 53 pages
Published by Math Paper Press, 2015
Shortlisted for the 2016 Singapore Literature Prize (English Poetry)
Synopsis:
The city is a prism through which ordinary life, at first a seeming undifferentiated white, splits into its constituent colours. In Deeds of Light, words are prisms through which experiences are revealed. Belying a desire to make new and bright the usual ways of talking about place and belonging, these poems in both form and content navigate the myriad ways in which the sound of speech and the habits of culture interact and assert themselves.
About the Author:
Assembled with parts from Hong Kong and Malaysia, Tse Hao Guang is interested in form and formation, creativity and quotation, lyrics and line breaks. His chapbook is hyperlinkage (Math Paper Press, 2013). He graduated from the Masters of Arts Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago in 2014 with a concentration in poetry and creative writing, and co-edits the cross-genre, collaborative literary journal OF ZOOS, as well as UnFree Verse, an anthology of Singapore poetry in received and nonce forms. He serves as the critical essays editor of Poetry.Sg, an online repository of local verse, as well as a directory of the people who write it.
Tse Hao Guang is interested in form and formation, creativity and quotation, lyrics and line breaks. His chapbook is hyperlinkage (Math Paper Press, 2013), and his first full-length collection is Deeds of Light (Ten Year Series, 2015), for which he has been shortlisted for the 2016 Singapore Literature Prize in English Poetry. He graduated from the Masters of Arts Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago in 2014, and co-edits the literary journal OF ZOOS, and the anthology UnFree Verse, forthcoming from Ethos Books.
Poetry, 71 pages
Published by Math Paper Press, 2015
Synopsis:
This is a meditation on the ineffable sense of loss that accompanies each having.
Through the death of his father, a son apprehends other deaths and finds each manifestation inevitable, yet enclosed with possibility; violence bears love and is borne of it, guilt seeds redemption, and faith is found within apostasy. What emerges from For the End Comes Reaching are poems that bear witness to the alchemy of human experience.
About the Author:
David Wong Hsien Ming discovered poetry as a child at a Sunday lunch. His work has won Second Prize in Singapore’s Golden Point Award 2015, and has appeared in publications like Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Ceriph, and Mascara Literary Review. He read philosophy at the University of Melbourne, graduating with honours, and is a high school teacher.
David Wong Hsien Ming is a high school teacher. His work has won Second Prize in Singapore’s Golden Point Award in 2015, and has appeared in publications like Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Ceriph, and Mascara Literary Review. He read philosophy at the University of Melbourne, graduating with honours. For The End Comes Reaching (Ten Year Series, 2015) is his first collection of poems.