Get it in Writing
Clarissa tan
Clarissa Tan is a freelance journalist in Singapore with a secret life in fiction. She is the final winner of the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize, awarded by the Spectator for travel writing. The prize was given annually to the contestant "best able, like the late Shiva Naipaul, to describe a visit to a foreign place or people". It was awarded not for travel writing in the conventional sense, but for "the most acute and profound observation of a culture evidently alien to the writer".
As a journalist, Clarissa focuses on travel and the arts, and is a contributing editor of asia! magazine. She also writes art and book reviews for other publications such as the Business Times. Her most recent travel articles include coverage of butlers in Bali, winemakers in California, orphanages in Cambodia, medieval pageantry in Tuscany, bookstores in Sydney and artisans in Spitalfields, London.
Clarissa has interviewed authors of various genres, including Hilary Mantel, Andrea Levy, Vikram Seth, Alain de Botton, Alexander McCall Smith, Xinran, Mitch Albom and Jeffery Archer, as well as personalities in other creative fields such as Jeff Koons, Terence Conran, Stephen Dillane and Ethan Hawke. Of late, she has developed the alarming habit of contacting people she finds intriguing and asking them if they would like to say anything.
Clarissa likes working with different media, and has written documentary scripts for TV production companies such as threesixzero. She has worked with mobile developer Omnitoons to produce a modern English version of the Chinese classical text the Shi Jing (or Book of Songs) as an app on the iPhone.
A Malaysian by birth, Clarissa is now rather painfully working on her first novel. She also writes short works of fiction, the most recently published of which was Five Seasons. Her blog Words and Letters, which has been described as both beautiful and baffling, is a series of poetic vignettes that explores the nature of fiction.
Prior to turning freelance in 2007, Clarissa had more than 10 years’ experience in financial journalism. She was as an editor for Bloomberg News and before that, Dow Jones & Co.
Besides English, Malay and Cantonese, Clarissa also speaks French and sometimes acts as a translator and interpreter. On weekends, she volunteers as a guide at the Singapore Art Museum.
Update: Clarissa will be writing from Paris and London from April to August 2010.
