By Yeow Kai Chai

Judith Huang knows a thing or two about worlds within worlds.

In her debut novel Sofia and the Utopia Machine, which was shortlisted for the Epigram Book Fiction Prize 2017, she focuses on an ordinary schoolgirl in a future Singapore who inadvertently unlocks the gateway to a new alternate reality.

More recently, in March, she wrote the script for Scarce City, produced by Rainshadow Studios, a non-profit organisation making art centred on the environment and climate change. Part-strategy game and part-immersive theatre, this experimental project integrated motion tracking and player-responsive lighting and score to create a world where visitors could determine the future of the planet Opalia. ​

Based between Singapore and Australia, she herself slips between countries and realities. A three-time winner of the Foyle Young Poet of the Year Award and a graduate from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts in English and American Literature and Language, she now works as a writer, editor and translator.

She has published original work in Prairie Schooner, Asia Literary Review, Creatrix, The South China Morning Post, The Straits Times, Lianhe Zaobao, QLRS and Cha. As well as being a founding member of the Spittoon Collective and magazine in China, she has translated numerous works of writers for the National Library Board, including four books of Chinese poetry by Cultural Medallion recipient, Yeng Pway Ngon. 

1. What are you reading right now?
A few books on the go at the moment – Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, which is proving to be eerily prescient (it's set in the year 2024 and predicted many things about our world back in 1993); Helen Mort's The Illustrated Woman, which is simply quietly brilliant; and Richard Fidler's The Book of Roads and Kingdoms, which is giving me post-pandemic wanderlust once again.

2. If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play or poem, what would you be and why?
I would be the raven in Edgar Allan Poe's poem, because my favourite poetic device is repetition.

3. What is the greatest misconception about you?
I think since publishing my novel people have come to think of me as a novelist, but I still consider myself a poet first. More recently I have come into my own as a visual artist as well, which is something which I had always had a talent for but hadn't deliberately cultivated. I had a breakthrough in this when I realised I had found my medium – fountain pen ink and bleach on watercolour paper.

4. Name one living writer and one dead writer you most identify with, and tell us why.
Ben Okri and Virginia Woolfe. I feel that Ben Okri has a prophetic voice in his novels and poems that I hope to emulate, and Virginia Woolfe was a trailblazer in her time and sometimes when I read her prose it seems like she's able to capture thoughts I have in a very prescient way.

5. Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
I do experience writer's block. I have come to think of it as a necessary "fallow" period for creativity. I feel like artists tend to gather inspiration in a "thought cloud" that eventually gathers enough density for it to rain, and that this takes time. So rather than beat myself up about not writing, I take those fallow periods as a necessary part of the cycle of creativity.

6.  What qualities do you most admire in a writer?
The ability to turn a phrase in a way that makes it feel inevitable. An unflinching dedication to telling the truth. I think it takes a lot of bravery to tell truths that society would rather keep hidden, or truths about yourself and your experience. So I really admire writers who are able to do that.

7. What is one trait you most deplore in writing or writers?
I feel like writers tend to write about characters who are writers too much. I realise it comes from writing what you know, but I find it a little self-indulgent.

8. Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
I really liked Neil Gaiman's statement that novel writing is similar to building a drystone wall, and that you really just need to put the next word down like another stone. I've found that to be very true.

9. Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I...
have also written a knitting pattern, which every now and then earns me a few bucks on Ravelry.

10. At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy or an action thriller to watch, which would you go for?
In my younger years I would pick a tragedy, but I think now I would choose a comedy, because there is so much in life to celebrate and laugh at, and it's a mistake to think that sad films are necessarily the most important ones.

11. What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
My favourite word is "mellifluous," and my least favourite is "deadline."

12. Please compose a short-short story in three sentences that include the following three items: replicant, submersible, maiko.
The maiko, threatened with being replaced by a replicant, decided her best course of action was to escape the billionaire's island in the company submersible. But first, she had to get past the heavily-guarded corridor that led from her quarters to the port. The robot guards were unrelenting, and as she aimed a flying kick at one of them, a gash appeared on her ankle, revealing, to her shock, three winking wires.

13. What object is indispensable to you when you write?
My fountain pen! I find using a real nib on good paper to be soothing and motivating.

14. What is the best time of the day for writing?
Late at night.

15. If you have a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
O'Brien from 1984, Leo Tolstoy raised from the dead, and Václav Havel. I would love to be privy to the political discussion they would get into.

16. People know you primarily for your debut novel Sophia and the Utopia Machine, but you have since diversified your writing portfolio. What have you been up to, and what are you interested to pursue creatively?
Since publishing the novel, I have been branching out to explore the visual arts as well as writing and have completed a couple of projects that incorporate multimedia elements as well as stories and poetry.

Recently, my VR project Marcus and the Shadow, which is adapted from a picture book I wrote, showed at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. And I also wrote the script for Scarce City, an interactive, immersive theatre piece that had a successful run at Stamford Arts Centre in March 2023, and aims to impart a message about sustainability through gameplay.

It was a wonderful challenge working in these media, especially since from a young age I have always been interested in immersive, multi-sensory art pieces.

17. What would you write on your own tombstone?
She rests her case.

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