By Stephanie Yap

Writers here now have more reason to pick up their pens: the National Book Development Council is seriously considering setting up two more literary prizes.

The first is a children's book award to give children's writers in Singapore 'an added stimulus to provide children with material which is Singaporean, if not Asian, in context', says book council executive director R. Ramachandran.

The second and more ambitious prize is an Asian book award co-organised with arts venue The Arts House. It will be similar in scope to the Man Asian Literary Prize based in Hong Kong and the Australia-Asia Literary Award based in Perth.

While plans are still in the initial stages, Mr Ramachandran says the award will boost Singapore's literary profile. 'It will firmly establish Singapore as the hub for writers of Asian content,' he says.

Meanwhile, recipients of this year's Singapore Literature Prize, awarded last week, should savour their win - for they probably will not qualify for the next edition of the biennial prize.

The book council says it is considering three revisions to the rules of the prize, including barring winners in a given year from the following round of nominations.

He says the revisions are based on feedback received from the judges and the writing community over the years.

'The Book Council is considering discontinuing consecutive winnings to give an opportunity to new and emerging authors to win the prize.'

Another proposed change is a new rule that a 'significant percentage' of the content of a submitted work should not have been published elsewhere before. 'This will encourage writers to constantly be producing new works,' he adds.

A third revision will require prize-winners to conduct workshops and take part in mentorship programmes for aspiring writers.

The reaction to the proposed revisions, particularly the first, is mixed among this year's winners.

Some, such as writer Mohamed Latiff Mohamed, 58, who has won in the Malay category three consecutive times in 2004, 2006 and 2008, says the proposed new rule is unfair as it is the books that should be judged rather than the writers.

'If you do that, you are going to disqualify those who work really hard. I think it is not right if you don't give the prize to the work which is most outstanding,' says Mohamed Latiff, who won this year for his poetry collection When The Butterfly Cracks Its Wings.

As a retired teacher and full-time writer, he relies on the $10,000 prize money to support his family.

'The money is very important to me, not to enjoy, but to put my two children through university, one in Australia and one in Singapore,' he says.

But others welcome the proposed changes and even say that the book council should do more to help new writers.

Tamil prize-winner K. Kanagalatha, 40, who won the award for her short story collection The Women I Murder, says: 'You have to give other people a chance. It would be great if they give the prize to an unpublished work and use the money to publish and distribute the work.

'It is not easy to get published in Singapore and to get readership is the most difficult thing.' The news editor of Tamil Murasu newspaper is published in India by a publishing house there, but has to self-publish her work here.

But ultimately, it is the recognition the prize accords, rather than the money, which is important, say writers Chia Hwee Pheng, 51, and Yeng Pway Ngon, 61, who each received only half the money the other winners received, as they tied in the Chinese category this year.

The former wrote The Collection Of Mini-Fiction by Xi Ni Er (his nom de plume) and the latter the novel Trivialities About Me And Myself.

Chia says: 'The award means more than the money. I'm honoured to share the award with Pway Ngon as he is one of our literary pioneers. I was already reading his books when I was a teenager.'

This article was first published in The Straits Times on Dec 12, 2008.