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In veteran playwright Desmond Sim’s first collection for students, food and family ground seven heartwarming plays as sons and daughters, fathers and grandmothers fight, heal and find love in the kitchen and around the dining table. This collection includes Drunken Prawns, winner of the first Hewlett Packard/Action Theatre Ten-Minute Play Contest, and other critically acclaimed plays such as Teochew Porridge and The Durian Man and His Daughters, with a foreword by Dr. K.K. Seet.
On Drunken Prawns
Winner of the First Prize in the 1993 Hewlett Packard/Action Theatre Ten-Minute Play Contest
“[Desmond Sim] uses food as a tool to prise open frayed family relationships in order to examine the strong, often painful emotions that long lie deeply hidden. Sim…borrows heavily from personal experiences. He ruminates on the process of change—the nub of his plays.”
–The Straits Times
“…an authentic flavour. Playwright Sim has a good ear for dialogue.”
–The Business Times
On Teochew Porridge
“…a warm serving of heartfelt personal theatre that we haven’t seen for a while…honest and poignant…a story about love, pain and how some things between a father and son will always be timeless…Teochew Porridge is certainly a dish that was served just right.”
–The Straits Times
On Perfecting Pratas
“…one of those precious few Singaporean plays that’s truly naturalistic. Playwright Desmond Sim paints a touching portrait of a Chinese widower bringing up his half-Indian teenage son…”
–Ng Yi-Sheng, The Flying Inkpot
Desmond Sim is an award-winning playwright, poet and writer. Almost all of his 30 plays to date have been performed in professional theatres in Singapore, Malaysia and the United States. He was TheatreWorks' first playwright-in-residence and has been the associate artistic director of ACTION Theatre since April 2004, running Singapore Theatre Oasis, an incubator programme for new and existing Singaporean playwrights. He has participated in the Shanghai Literary Festival and was awarded a Fulbright fellowship. Desmond has also co-written two movies: Beautiful Boxer (Thailand) and The Wedding Game (Singapore). He is an acknowledged Peranakan painter who has held more than a dozen exhibitions on Peranakan figurative themes. Desmond also teaches playwriting, branding, marketing and communications at Temasek Polytechnic Design School and Lasalle College of the Arts.
