Author tackles inequality after battling own demons
Singaporean author overcame eye condition to finish novel
While jobless in Australia and suffering from an eye condition in 2016, author Judith Huang was at one of her lowest points.
There was also her unfinished manuscript for Sofia And The Utopia Machine, a novel she had been putting off for six years.
Determined to regain control of her life, she finished the book, which was shortlisted for an award last year.
Sofia And The Utopia Machine, one of four finalists for the Epigram Books Fiction Prize 2017, is about a girl who accesses a top-secret world-creating machine and runs afoul of an authoritarian government in a Singapore of the distant future.
Huang, 32, who teaches creative writing at Yale-NUS, said she had stress-induced blepharospasm, which caused her eyes to contract involuntarily.
"I could not stop blinking and could not work. At one point, botox had to be injected around my eyes," she told The New Paper.
The Singaporean had moved to Australia from China because of work visa issues.
Her employer gave her a month to sort out her eye condition but later told her there was no longer a vacancy.
On her decision to complete her first novel, Huang said: "I had felt guilty in the past six years whenever I was not working on the book.
"At one point, I was so sick of it, I could not even bring myself to open it."
In her dystopian tale, society is segregated into three groups - elites who live in the lofty Canopies, civil servants and professionals who live in the comfortable Midlevels, and the rest who eke out a living in the watery Voids.
Huang said: "I hope this book can be part of the conversation that an unequal society is unsustainable."
The first draft was completed in six weeks in 2011, when she wrote 2,000 words daily after a challenge by her friend.
On the book's politics, she said: "Science fiction is a projection of societal trends today and so is necessarily political. A book about a believable future is also a commentary on the state of affairs today."
She is proud her book was published but feels challenges remain, such as getting Singaporeans to be more supportive of local literature.
She said: "Our education focuses a lot on texts from England or America, which might create the impression that works produced here are sub-par. But they really are not.
"They might even be more uncomfortable because of how close they strike home. We just need to get over the weirdness of reading about our own society."
Sofia And The Utopia Machine is available at bookstores at $18.10 inclusive of GST.
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