Alfian is currently the resident playwright of Singaporean theatre group W!LD RICE. He published his first collection of poetry at the age of 21, and proceeded to win multiple awards for his works since then. In The Optic Trilogy, the surfacing of buried secrets and repressed memories profoundly alters the. About the authorĪlfian Sa'at is a Singaporean writer, poet, and playwright. This collection of four plays by Alfian Sa’at explores the themes that have become a hallmark of the playwright’s work: national identity, racial relations, and the resistance of individuals against authoritarian systems. Rich in authentic detail, with a sensitive ear for the vernacular, Corridor paints an elegiac, revealing portrait of contemporary Singaporeans who exist along the city's corridors - haunted by lost loves, irrevocable childhoods, and a deep longing to be free.Ĭorridor won the Singapore Literature Prize Commendation Award in 1998. And a man enters a discotheque after a bitter divorce and re-learns the terror of falling in love all over again. A girl encounters a transvestite on an MRT train ride who tells her that she looks like a famous singer. A married couple receives free holiday tickets just when their luck seems to have run out. The characters in each story find themselves in situations that offer them a ticket to hope and change: A video camera transforms the way a resentful daughter sees her widowed mother.

With unsentimental clarity and heartbreaking honesty, Alfian Sa'at writes about HDB dwellers - students, housewives and factory workers, whose lives begin to unravel once they discover that happiness is a fragile thing in a country obsessed with progress and success. Corridor is a collection of short stories all set in present-day Singapore.

Corridor by Alfian Sa'at