Catherine Lim - Career

Career

She was born in the town of Kulim in Malaysia, and studied in the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Malaya in 1963. She emigrated to Singapore in 1967. In 1988, she received her PhD in Applied Linguistics from the National University of Singapore, and attended Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, in 1990 as a Fulbright Scholar. She had also worked as a teacher, and later, as project director with the Curriculum Development Institute of Singapore and a specialist lecturer with the Regional English Language Centre, teaching Socio-Linguistics and Literature. In 1992, she left her professional career to become a full-time writer. Since then, Lim was made a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government in 2003 and as an ambassador of the Hans Christian Andersen Foundation in Copenhagen in 2005. She was also honored with an Honorary Doctorate in Literature from Murdoch University and Southeast Asia Write Award.

Lim published her first short story collection called Little Ironies: Stories of Singapore (1978), which showed the wit with which Lim is able to portray Singaporean society. A succeeding collection, Or Else, the Lightning God and other Stories, was published in 1980. Another story collection that followed in this tradition was O Singapore: Stories in Celebration from 1988. Her first novel was published in 1982 and it was entitled The Serpent's Tooth. Other popular books that have been published since then were The Bondmaid (1995) and Following the Wrong God Home (2001). Her major theme in her stories is the role of women in traditional Chinese society and culture. In 1998 Lim was awarded the Montblanc-NUS Centre for the Arts Literary Award and in 1999 she received the S.E.A. Write Award.

In 2000, she worked with the now-defunct web portal Lycos Asia to pen an e-novella. The effort was called Leap of Love and was sold online (at 19 cents a chapter) before it was published by Horizon Books in 2003. It was released as the film The Leap Years by Singapore's Raintree Pictures in 2008. It is directed by Jean Yeo and stars Wong Li-Lin and Ananda Everingham.

Her best-selling novel, The Bondmaid (which sold 75,000 copies) was initially said to be produced as a film by Hong Kong director, Stanley Kwan, of 'Lan Yu' fame, starring Fann Wong. Fann Wong is a popular actress in Singapore who has won many awards and starred in Hollywood films. Confirmation of the production eventually waned off.