Catherine Lim


Catherine Lim Poh Imm is a Singaporean fiction author known for writing about Singapore society and of themes of traditional Chinese culture. Hailed as the "doyenne of Singapore writers", Lim has published nine collections of short stories, five novels, two poetry collections, and numerous political commentaries to date. Her social commentary in 1994, titled The PAP and the people - A Great Affective Divide and published in The Straits Times, criticised the ruling political party's agendas.

Career

Lim was born in Kulim and studied in the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus. Early childhood reading was mainly influenced by British fiction, including Enid Blyton, Richmal Crompton and some comics.
She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Malaya in 1963, moving to Singapore in 1967. In 1988, she received her PhD in applied linguistics from the National University of Singapore. Lim then attended Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley as a Fulbright scholar. She also worked as a teacher and later as project director with the Curriculum Development Institute of Singapore and as a specialist lecturer with the Regional English Language Centre, teaching sociolinguistics and literature. In 1992, she left her professional career to become a full-time writer. Lim was subsequently made a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2003 and an ambassador of the Hans Christian Andersen Foundation in 2005. She received an honorary doctorate in literature from Murdoch University.
Lim published her first short story collection called Little Ironies: Stories of Singapore in 1978. A succeeding collection, Or Else, the Lightning God and other Stories, was published in 1980. The short story collection was the first Singapore book to be tested for the Cambridge International Examinations in 1989 and 1990. Another story collection that followed in this tradition was O Singapore!: Stories in Celebration from 1989, but two years earlier she published The Shadow of a Shadow of a Dream, which found Lim experimenting with new techniques and extending her subject range.
Her first novel, The Serpent's Tooth, was published in 1982. Other books that have been published since then include The Bondmaid and Following the Wrong God Home. The major theme in her stories is the role of women in traditional Chinese society and culture. In 1998 Lim was awarded the Montblanc-NUS Centre for the Arts Literary Award and in 1999 she received the S.E.A. Write Award.
In 2000, Lim worked with the now-defunct web portal Lycos Asia to write an e-novella called Leap of Love. It was sold online before it was published by Horizon Books in 2003. It served as basis for the film The Leap Years by Raintree Pictures in 2008.
Another best-selling novel was The Bondmaid, which sold 75,000 copies.
In 2014, Lim was inducted into the Singapore Women's Hall of Fame.
In 2015, Little Ironies: Stories of Singapore was selected by The Business Times as one of the Top 10 English Singapore books from 1965 to 2015, alongside titles by Arthur Yap and Daren Shiau. In the same year, The Straits Times' Akshita Nanda selected Little Ironies: Stories of Singapore as one of 10 classic Singapore books. "Catherine Lim's early short, sharp fiction describes the results of such social engineering", she wrote, "a Singapore growing more cosmopolitan and Singaporeans losing touch with their roots. Little Ironies spotlights ordinary people at their best and worst, such as 'The Taximan's Story', in which a cab driver is happy to make money off sex workers while looking down on them."

Incident

Lim came into conflict with the People's Action Party in 1994 when she wrote an article published in The Straits Times. From comments made by then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong and other cabinet ministers, especially George Yeo, this episode gave rise to the political "out of bounds" marker that came to be known as "boh tua boh suay". Lee Kuan Yew dismissed Lim's views as "the popular theory that the Western press writes about".

Works

Novels

  • The Serpent's Tooth
  • The Bondmaid
  • The Teardrop Story Woman
  • Following the Wrong God Home
  • A Leap of Love: A Novella
  • The Song of Silver Frond
  • ''Miss Seetoh in the World''

    Short story collections

  • Little Ironies: Stories of Singapore
  • Or Else, the Lightning God and Other Stories
  • They Do Return...But Gently Lead Them Back
  • The Shadow of a Shadow of a Dream: Love Stories of Singapore
  • O Singapore! Stories in Celebration
  • Deadline for Love and Other Stories
  • Meet Me on the Queen Elizabeth 2!
  • The Best of Catherine Lim
  • The Woman's Book of Superlatives
  • The Howling Silence: tales of the dead and their return
  • ''The Catherine Lim Collection''

    Poetry

  • Love's Lonely Impulses
  • ''Humoresque''

    Non-fiction

  • Unhurried Thoughts At My Funeral
  • A Watershed Election: Singapore's GE 2011
  • Roll Out the Champagne, Singapore!: An Exuberant Celebration of the Nation's 50th Birthday
  • ''An Equal Joy: Reflections on God, Death and Belonging''

    Plays

  • ''Kampong Amber''

    Anthologies

  • Gwee Li Sui, ed. ''Written Country: The History of Singapore through Literature''