I found this article in one of my bookmarks. Sudhir did a feature on Edmund Wee. Click on the link to read the full article.
Edmund was on the board of the Substation and Independent Art Archive. Not mentioned in this article, but Edmund supported the arts. Like some of Lee Wen's friends, he supported Lee Wen's archival fever (Lee Wen founded and depended on his supporters to fund the Independent Art Archive). I always felt that Edmund took risks both in his publishing business and in supporting artistic endeavours. This is the attitude that I admired about Edmund.
I have 'highlighted' some info from the article which I found relevant, interesting and informative for my research.
"Epigram Books owes its existence partly to Lee Kuan Yew’s secret police."
As a young journalist, Edmund covered 1981 by-election.
[...] plain-clothes officers from the Internal Security Department watched in horror as a young reporter from the Straits Times jumped up and down at the counting centre.
[...] career suicide for journalists from the government-controlled media outfits to show appreciation for the opposition.
Wee journalism career was affected as he would not be promoted over the years.
[...] Wee used the time to learn about graphic design and marketing. In 1991 he left the paper to start up a design agency.
Epigram was founded because a friend (who climed Everest) couldn't find a publisher. Wee saw an opportunity to shake up the publishing industry (one which faced bad design and over saturation of poetry anthologies). [...] ‘You have [Singaporeans] who have gone to study how to write, they want to write, and they’re not being served by publishers.’
[...] Epigram Books was launched in 2011 and quickly became known for its edgy marketing and arresting sleeve design.
[...] The NAC withdrew its funding of the book and drastically cut its annual grants to Epigram Books. (A separate satire of the Lee family may also have irritated the NAC’s career-minded bureaucrats).
[...] Huggs-Epigram Coffee Bookshop [...] is Singapore’s only bookshop dedicated to local works.
In 1822, three years after Stamford Raffles ushered in British colonialism, Singapore’s first printing press arrived from Malacca with Claudius Henry Thomsen of the London Missionary Society (LMS). Thomsen and two workmen did type cutting, bookbinding and other publishing work in English and Malay. Capabilities for Arabic, Chinese and Siamese soon followed.
[...] In 1823 LMS missionaries established Singapore’s first ever publisher, the Mission Press, which over the next two decades served God, the government and the people, publishing among other things the Singapore Chronicle, the island’s first newspaper, and more than 2 million pages of tracts and scriptures in Chinese, Malay and Buginese.
The 1830s-1870s were arguably the golden era of Malay publishing, thanks partly to two men: Munshi Abdullah, a Melaka-born scribe, teacher and translator of mixed Tamil-Yemeni descent, who is best known as Raffles’s muse and author of Hikayat Abdullah (Abdullah’s Story); and Benjamin Keasberry, an India-born British missionary who made it his life’s work to teach—not just proselytise—the Malays, partly by publishing numerous academic and popular books in Malay. (‘Missionary to the Malays’ says his epitaph.)
[...] Following independence in 1965, Lee Kuan Yew accelerated Singapore along the global-city trajectory the British had put it on. [...]
‘Poetry is a luxury we cannot afford,’ Lee famously quipped, confirming that in his Singapore, language is primarily a market tool. In the 1990s Lee’s successor dissuaded the use of Singlish, our delightful Creole, petrified that it might displace the Queen’s English and turn off the globe-trotting elite. [...]
[...] One could easily get lost in the children’s section, where the eight-part Diary of Amos Lee, one of Epigram Books’s crown jewels with more than 200,000 copies sold, resides. ‘If I wanted to be very, very profitable, I would just close everything else and publish “middle-grade”,’ Wee says. [...]
[...] “Nathan saw the Harry series [about Lee]. Then he called me up and asked if his life story could also be written for kids.” [...]
Wee has been on a crusade to get Singaporeans to read local stories about local people. “Why aren’t schoolchildren reading ‘Sugarbread’ instead of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’?” he says, referencing the first book by Balli Kaur Jaswal, one of Singapore’s best-known novelists. “It’s a wonderful story about racism in Singapore.”
[...] “I decided forget about the bloody old boys club in London. Why should I have the Booker? Why can’t I sell books in ASEAN countries? ASEAN is six hundred and fifty million people, you know?”
[...] Like other discontents who dance on the edges of mainstream society, Wee trades in the vocabulary of the oppressed. He is a self-professed “outsider” and “maverick”, somebody who finds affinity with “people on the fringes”.
[...] These include the drug addicts and Hell’s Angels he hung out with in the 1970s at a commune in Hamilton, New Zealand, while completing a bachelor’s and master’s in psychology at the University of Waikato; as well as the Singaporean delinquents he wrote about in the 1980s for the Straits Times: the “McDonald’s kids” and “Far East [shopping centre] kids”, seemingly aimless uniformed teenagers spending their afternoons not rote learning but—horrors!—conversing with others.
[...] Almost three decades after his shenanigans at the Workers’ Party victory in 1981, Wee’s editor at the paper questioned him about it in preparation for his own memoirs. It turned out that 163 cm tall Wee was jumping, not in celebration, but because he wanted to see over the head of the 183 cm correspondent from Monitor, a competing paper. The ISD’s officers had misinterpreted the jump.
