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ABOUT FOOD REPUBLIC (2020)
EDITED BY ANN ANG, DARYL LIM WEI JIE, TSE HAO GUANG

Food Republic is a generous serving of Singapore's food culture: from the making and eating of food, to the sale and hawking of it, our love and hate of it, and the effects of its consumption and deprivation.

Food has always been our safe space, our comfort zone: a place where we could freely engage in heated arguments about the best nasi lemak, the most fragrant cendol and whether the standard of the stall has dropped or not. Yet this anthology, featuring more than one hundred literary explorations of our food and food culture, also shows that when people write about food, they often aren't just talking about food but usually about something else, closer to the heart. Or the bone.

Curated from previously published work and selections from an open call, the poems, fiction and non-fiction in Food Republic range from the passionately realised to tantalisingly surreal. Think of it as a buffet, a banquet, an omakase, a smorgasbord, a nasi padang spread, a thali or a rijssttafel – we hope we've assembled one to your taste. Come. Eat.

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“To me, the best part of reading an anthology is in the constant awareness of its curation. With each piece, I marvel at the creativity of the individual work while pondering the unique perspective that it contributes to the collective.

Look forward to a range of works that will take you through the real and mystical, the past and present, as well as multiple literary forms and genres. Surely some will suit your palate.”

— Ping Er, SethLui.com (12 Aug 2020)

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“The anthology is a multigenerational one, ranging from the late Arthur Yap's seminal poem, the correctness of flavour, in which a sherbet shop becomes a farcical battleground for English versus Singlish, to ‘Besok sunrise egg still put’ by Hamid Roslan, who is shortlisted for this year's Singapore Literature Prize.”

— Olivia Ho, “Singapore Shelf: Anthology Food Republic serves up a smorgasbord of local food literature”, The Straits Times (3 Aug 2020)

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“Singapore culture is inseparable from food culture, and Food Republic: A Singapore Literary Banquet is a veritable feast. This anthology is a buffet of literary styles and genres exploring every aspect of our food and food culture – the creativity and depth on display bring greater understanding and appreciation of the grub we put on our tables every day. ”

— Cheryl Sekkappan, “Local literature from Singapore to read now”, TimeOut Singapore (26 Nov 2020)

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“Even for a reader unfamiliar with Singaporean food, or regional food, there is a lot to like here, and even a lot to learn, perhaps about food, but also through its specificities, about the universality of the human condition. Any book that can do that is a book well worth reading, and ‘Food Republic’ is many things, but certainly that.”

— Marc de Faoite, “Food Republic: an anthology that explores the role food plays in our lives”, TheVibes.com (20 Feb 2021)

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“Food Republic captures how thoroughly food saturates every aspect of Singaporean life... Food Republic is invasively intimate, like a glimpse of the contents of someone's fridge. [Food Republic] look[s] at the who and where and when of food in Singapore, rather than the what. To take a culture long defined by food, and to remind us that it is actually we who matter, and that we give food its meaning.”

— Tse Wei, “Potato eater”, The Mekong Review (Aug 2021)