On hindsight, the title of Sebastian’s latest English novel And The Award Goes To Sally Bong! was auspicious. On January 16, it nabbed him the top prize at the Epigram Books Fiction Prize, sharing the honour with another local author Meihan Boey.
This is not his first rodeo either. Sebastian was shortlisted for The Epigram Books Fiction Prize 2015 for the novel Let’s Give It Up For Gimme Lao!, and went on to win the prize in 2017 for The Riot Act, a satire of the 2013 Little India Riot. We find out how he’s feeling after this year’s win and dig deeper into the long and unusual road he’s taken to literary success in Singapore.
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At the start of the interview, Sebastian admits to having slight nerves at having to speak over the phone. It’s a candid admission that immediately puts things at ease, and he needn’t have worried – his positivity and authenticity is easy to like.
When prompted to share his feelings about winning The Epigram Books Fiction Prize for a second time, Sebastian describes the excitement among his friends as he made it into the longlist, and then the shortlist of the book awards.
“My friends were writing to me and saying, Sebastian, make it a double win! I said, that’s not going to happen because the Epigram Books Fiction Prize is meant to groom new authors,” he says.
We all know how that turned out, of course. Sebastian was caught off-guard but is ultimately grateful.
“The fact that the judges are judging just based on manuscript without consideration as to whether it's a new author or experienced author – for that I'm very grateful.”
A divergent path
Sebastian wrote And The Award Goes To Sally Bong! as a companion piece to his very first English novel Let’s Give It Up For Gimme Lao!, a lively caper through the life of overachiever Gimme Lao.
Sally Bong on the other hand, is the underachiever. She’s a kind and intelligent woman who’s slowly crushed by a system that doesn’t reward the values she holds dear – creativity, generosity, and a willingness to put others first.
Sebastian’s stories are comedic, with large casts of characters from all walks of life. He aims to give readers an escape from reality, something that will make them laugh. More than that, Sebastian says that an accumulation of life experience has matured his aims.
“I don't want to write fun books just to be funny by itself… I think I can tell stories based on Singapore from my own experience and experience of my friends. So, I wanted there to be certain social messages or political themes in my book,” he says.
A life of lessons
And what a life he’s drawing from. Run a quick online search on Sebastian Sim and one is bound to learn that his life has not quite followed a traditional trajectory. By all accounts, he’s been a bartender, croupier, prison warden and office worker, running through at least nine jobs since turning down a scholarship with the National University of Singapore to go backpacking around the world.
The jobs were meant to support his first love – writing. But Sebastian has experienced a fair amount of rejection, taking ‘no’s from New York publishers, and then from local publishers, before trying his hand at Chinese wuxia novels. When that didn’t gain the clout he hoped it would either, he switched back to writing in English.
“It was a to and fro thing, trying my luck.”
The turning point came with the Epigram Books Fiction Prize in 2015. Thanks to a tip-off by a friend, Sebastian was able to finish up his manuscript of Let’s Give It Up for Gimme Lao! and make the submission.
“That was a turning point for me, a very important turning point. It went on to reach the shortlist but didn't win the award. But because Epigram was doing it for the first time, there was a lot of attention given to all the titles on the shortlist. So, I think that gave us a leap forward,” he says.
Since then, Let’s Give It Up For Gimme Lao! has steadily gained more fans through word of mouth. Sebastian gets readers writing in to tell him what they think of the book, and how they shared their love of it with friends.
His journey seems to have helped him build up a reservoir of wisdom and patience. He says, “I realised that books take time to build readership. That tells me that – don't be too hung up on good results. Give the book time to build its own readership. That's my takeaway.”
His advice for aspiring young writers? “Number one, you have to ask yourself the harsh questions because writing in Singapore is not likely to be able to feed you”, says Sebastian, citing Balli Kaur Jaswal, author of Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, as a rare local writer who has found international success.
“Ask yourself: are you willing to sacrifice a movie outing with friends? Are you going to discipline yourself to wake up at 4am to do two hours of writing before you go to work?”
It’s a harsh reality he’s learned himself, but Sebastian ultimately hopes his own story will inspire others to pursue writing. “Trust your heart. if you're passionate about it, if you keep thinking about it, if you tell yourself you'd rather do this than anything else, then that's probably the direction that you should be going towards.”
The plan ahead
Sebastian is self-aware enough to know that he can’t move on immediately to the next project. “I’m not like the writers who can write multiple books at a time. I’ll give myself a few months, even one or two years to catch up on my reading and let my ideas germinate…by the end of one year, my hand will be very itchy already, and I will want to write,” he half-jokes.
In the meantime, he’ll also be busy working with the Epigram Books editors to finalise And The Award Goes To Sally Bong! for publishing.
While we eagerly anticipate its release, we’ll take a leaf from his book. “I'm reading some local books by Ng Yi-Sheng and Alfian Sa'at now. To be honest, when I was young, I read a lot of foreign books. Right now, I feel like I should pay more attention to local writers, start making an effort to read their works."
