The POET

After five years spent transforming the Singapore Writers Festival from its helm, poet, educator and former festival director Pooja Nansi is embarking on her next chapter. The title? Whatever her soul craves.

- CHANDREYEE RAY

It is 8am on the last morning of the Singapore Writers Festival (SWF) in 2023 and Pooja Nansi is standing on the front lawn outside Arts House. No festivalgoers have arrived yet, so Nansi enjoys a rare moment of quiet, watching the coffee and bookstore vendors set up.

Beside her is Alex Lee, an events director Nansi worked alongside for the festival-whom she describes as "always having gone above and beyond". Lee eventually breaks the silence: "I'm going to miss working with you so much, Pooja." According to Nansi, this is the first time she has cried on festival grounds. This is hard for me to believe. Nansi is someone who operates on feelings. Big feelings, in fact, which seem to be her medium of choice even more so than words.

"I recall, at three or four years old, experiencing intense grief because my mother was getting rid of the dining table we'd had for a few years. I thought, 'Oh my god, this is the table that I did everything on. What am I going to do with all my feelings?" At the end of Nansi's fifth and final year helming SWF as festival director, she received rave reviews from major local publications on the festival's success during her tenure. One article noted that Nansi had had slightly longer than other festival directors to 'make her mark. The typical term of an SWF director is said to be four years, by which time Nansi had grown festival attendance by over 40 percent from the previous record.

What the same story had perhaps left out was that, in Nansi's hands, the festival had transformed.

It went from being a formal affair tailored largely to visitors who already considered themselves a part of the literary world (a meeting of intellects, if you will) to a no-holds-barred invitation to explore cleverly designed programmes on fashion, hip-hop, feminist horror and more.