By Yong Shu Hoong

When Marc Nair received the Young Artist Award (in 2016) – Singapore's highest accolade for art practitioners aged 35 and below – he posted a note of gratitude on Facebook, stating that his award "proves that poetry lives not just on the page or stage but can be a powerful collaborator with other art forms."

A poet with six volumes of poetry in his name, Marc is always eager to see how his words can be transformed when blended with music, film, theatre and visual arts. No stranger to the Singapore poetry slam scene, he has performed spoken word internationally for over 10 years.

As a skilled photographer, he has co-edited (with Yen Phang) This Is Not A Safety Barrier: An Anthology of Poetry & Photography (2016). His latest collection is Spomenik (2016), which compiles poems and photographs inspired by his travels in the Balkans.

Born in 1981, Marc is an English Literature graduate from the National University of Singapore. Between 2011 and 2014, he was the artistic director of an indie arts festival, Lit Up. A co-founder of a culture magazine called Mackerel, he is currently the national writer-in-residence at Nanyang Technological University.

1. What are you reading right now?
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay.

2. If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play, or poem, who would you be, and why?
Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Because of sentient mattresses and Marvin. Not so much the Vogon poetry.

3. What is the greatest misconception about you?
That I'm a serious person.

4. Name one living author and one dead author you identify with most, and tell us why.
Living – Anis Mojgani, because he tells rich, layered stories with such clarity of voice. Dead – Jack Kerouac, because the road was in his veins.

5. Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
I don't think I suffer from writer's block, but sometimes, I do run out of ideas. So if I have nothing to write about, I go out and make photographs.

6. What qualities do you admire most in a writer?
Inventiveness, original imagery, wit.

7. What is one trait you deplore most in writing or writers?
Stating the obvious.

8. Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see. – Henry David Thoreau

9. Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I...
can speak backwards rather fluently.

10. At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy, or an action thriller to watch, which will you go for, and why?
Comedy, because laughter is the gong of life.

11. What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
Favourite – small. Least favourite – revert.

12. Write a rhyming couplet that includes the following three items: prize, resident, type.

Some people become the prize-winning type,
Resident dreamers in the art of hype.

13. What object is indispensable to you when you write?
A pair of earphones.

14. What is the best time of the day for writing?
Between 9 and 11 in the morning or 10 and 12 at night.

15. If you had a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
Roald Dahl to find out what stories never made it to print.
Ken Liu because his mind is a menagerie.
Jon Snow, because I want to know how it's all going to go.

16. You have always been cross-genre in your approach to poetry – in terms of mixing words with performance, music and photography. How do you think the recognition and monetary reward of the Young Artist Award will help shape your continuing journey as a multi-hyphenated writer?
I'm not sure, to be honest. I'm keeping on doing what I do; nothing's changed as far as I know. I am working on my seventh book with my editors at Ethos Books, and preparing to re-stage a spoken word show sometime next year. And I will be launching a collaborative exhibition with a visual artist in January 2017.

17. What would you write on your own tombstone?
I highly doubt I'll be buried! But if I did get buried: "Here Lies A Body Of Work".

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