A wish list as festival audiences grow

Already missing the Singapore Writers Festival (SWF)? Fret not, as the festival will return in 2026 with the theme of Hidden In Plain Sight festival director Yong Shu Hoong's third edition.

- Shawn Hoo

Here are three things The Straits Times' arts team hopes to see in the next festival.

1. A BIGGER PUSH FOR INCLUSIVE, MULTILINGUAL PRACTICES AND PROGRAMMING

Kudos to the festival for offering live English interpretation for 20 Malay, Tamil and Mandarin sessions, encouraging crosslanguage contact at the multilingual festival. It attracted this reporter to attend a Tamil panel for the first time, learning about serialised novels in the Tamil Murasu newspaper and books with feminist themes.

The human interpreters did a fine job of translating the session into English, although not so much the transcript automated by artificial intelligence (AI). The interface was intuitive, requiring just a smartphone browser and headphones. Still, this new feature was not broadly advertised and there was scarce information about the service online.

The festival can afford to push this more consciously to festivalgoers.