SG-H-CS-05 | Goh Sin Tub — The Literary Civil Servant

Document Code: SG-H-CS-05 Full Title: Goh Sin Tub — The Literary Civil Servant Coverage Period: 1927–2004 Level Designation: Level 3 Profile Primary Sources Consulted:

1. Goh Sin Tub, The Dogged Victims of Inexorable Fate (Singapore: Heinemann Asia, 1977)
2. Goh Sin Tub, Honour and Other Stories (Singapore: Heinemann Asia, 1982)
3. Goh Sin Tub, Tall Tales and Misadventures of a Young Westernised Oriental Gentleman (Singapore: Heinemann Asia, 1993)
4. Goh Sin Tub, Ghosts of Singapore (Singapore: Landmark Books, 1998)
5. Goh Sin Tub, The Eye of the Beholder (Singapore: Landmark Books, 2000)
6. Edwin Thumboo (ed.), The Fiction of Singapore (Singapore: UniPress, 1990)
7. Koh Tai Ann, "Singapore Writing in English: An Overview," in Ban Kah Choon, Anne Pakir, and Tong Chee Kiong (eds.), Imagining Singapore (Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 2004)
8. Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story 1965–2000 (Singapore: Times Editions, 2000)

Related Documents:

• SG-G-05 | Singapore Literature in English — Historical Development
• SG-H-CS-14 | Ngiam Tong Dow — Comparative senior civil servant with a literary dimension
• SG-C-05 | The Industrialisation Decade (1971–1979) — Context for Goh's civil service career
• SG-D-10 | Cultural Policy in Singapore — The State and the Arts

Version Date: 2026-03-09

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Section 1: Key Takeaways

• Goh Sin Tub was one of the most unusual figures in Singapore's civil service history: a senior government official who simultaneously maintained a prolific career as a writer of fiction, producing short stories, novels, and humorous accounts that offer a distinctive literary perspective on Singapore society from the colonial period through independence and rapid modernisation.

• His civil service career spanned several decades, during which he held senior positions in government administration while pursuing his literary work in whatever hours remained — a dual career that was remarkable for its sustained productivity in both domains.

• His fiction — particularly his short stories — is distinguished by a wry, observational humour and a capacity for capturing the textures of everyday Singaporean life: the social hierarchies, the cultural misunderstandings, the quiet absurdities of a society undergoing rapid transformation from colonial backwater to modern metropolis.

• Goh's most celebrated work, Ghosts of Singapore, combined ghost stories drawn from local folklore with social observation, creating a genre that was distinctively Singaporean — rooted in the multicultural supernatural traditions of Southeast Asia but inflected with the sensibility of an educated, anglophone civil servant.

• His writing provides a literary record of Singapore's social transformation that complements the official historical narrative. Where government documents record policy decisions and economic statistics, Goh's fiction records the human experience of living through those changes — the bewilderment of rapid modernisation, the clash between traditional values and contemporary pressures, the comedy and pathos of social aspiration.

• As a "Westernised Oriental Gentleman" (his own self-description, drawn with deliberate irony), Goh occupied a distinctive cultural position: educated in English, trained in the colonial administrative tradition, immersed in Western literary culture, but rooted in the Chinese-Singaporean social world. His writing explores the tensions and ironies of this hybrid identity with a lightness of touch that distinguishes it from the more earnest treatments of cultural identity in other Singapore literary works.

• His career raises important questions about the relationship between bureaucratic discipline and creative expression in Singapore's administrative culture. The dominant narrative of Singapore's civil service emphasises efficiency, pragmatism, and results-oriented professionalism; Goh's literary career demonstrates that the administrative elite was not monolithically technocratic but included individuals with rich inner lives and creative ambitions.

• Goh's relative marginalisation in the canon of Singapore literature — he is less studied than contemporaries such as Edwin Thumboo, Catherine Lim, or Gopal Baratham — reflects the broader difficulty of situating humorous, popular fiction within a literary establishment that has tended to privilege poetry, political fiction, and formally experimental work.

• His death in 2004 removed one of the last living witnesses to the colonial-to-independence transition who could describe that transition from the dual perspective of insider (civil servant) and observer (writer).

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Section 2: The Record in Brief

Goh Sin Tub lived two careers simultaneously. By day, he was a senior civil servant in the Singapore government, administering programmes, managing staff, and contributing to the institutional machinery that transformed a colonial port city into a modern nation-state. By night — and during weekends, holidays, and whatever other fragments of time he could claim from official duties — he was a writer, producing the short stories, novels, and humorous essays that constitute one of the most distinctive bodies of work in Singapore's English-language literary tradition.

Born on 2 December 1927 and educated in the colonial school system, Goh entered the civil service in the years when Singapore was transitioning from British rule to self-governance. His administrative career progressed through the standard postings of the Singapore civil service, taking him through various government departments and exposing him to the operational realities of governance in a society undergoing rapid and often turbulent change.

His literary career began alongside his administrative work and continued throughout his decades of government service and into his retirement. His output was remarkably varied: short stories that ranged from social realism to supernatural horror, novels that explored Singapore's multicultural society, and humorous essays that drew on his experiences as a civil servant navigating the often-absurd intersection of bureaucratic procedure and human complexity.

What made Goh distinctive — and what makes his work valuable as a historical document as well as a literary achievement — was his insider's perspective on Singapore's administrative and social worlds. He wrote about the civil service not as an outsider looking in but as a participant observing the system from within, noting its virtues and absurdities with equal attentiveness. His short stories frequently feature civil servants, office workers, and middle-class professionals navigating the social expectations and institutional pressures of a society that was simultaneously modernising at breakneck speed and clinging to traditional values and superstitions.

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Section 3: Timeline of Key Events

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Section 4: Background and Context

English-Language Literature in Singapore

The literary tradition into which Goh wrote was young, fragile, and contested. English-language literature in Singapore had no deep historical roots; it was a product of colonial education, and its practitioners were, almost by definition, members of the English-educated elite whose relationship to the broader, multilingual society was complicated. The development of a Singapore literary tradition in English required writers to negotiate multiple tensions: between local identity and the colonial literary heritage, between the desire for artistic autonomy and the government's instrumental approach to culture, and between the aesthetics of international English-language fiction and the particularities of Singaporean experience.

Goh's position in this literary landscape was distinctive. He was not a university-based writer like Edwin Thumboo, whose poetry was deeply engaged with questions of national identity and the construction of a Singapore literary canon. He was not a political novelist like Gopal Baratham, whose fiction confronted the authoritarian dimensions of Singapore governance. He was, instead, a popular writer — a storyteller whose primary aim was to entertain, to amuse, and to capture the textures of Singaporean life with a fidelity that was often more revealing than more self-consciously literary works.

The Civil Service and Culture

The Singapore civil service of Goh's era was not, as a general rule, a hospitable environment for literary or artistic pursuits. The service valued efficiency, discipline, and pragmatism; it did not particularly value creativity, self-expression, or the kind of critical observation that is the writer's stock-in-trade. Officers who wished to pursue artistic interests were expected to do so in their own time and to maintain a clear separation between their professional responsibilities and their personal activities.

Goh navigated this environment with apparent ease, maintaining his literary productivity without — as far as the public record shows — allowing it to interfere with his administrative duties or provoke the disapproval of his superiors. This may have been facilitated by the fact that his fiction, while sharply observational, was never directly critical of the government or its policies. His humour was gentle rather than satirical, his social commentary was embedded in character and situation rather than expressed as polemic, and his subjects — everyday life, social pretensions, supernatural encounters — were unlikely to attract the attention of the political censors.

The "Westernised Oriental Gentleman"

Goh's self-description as a "Westernised Oriental Gentleman" — a phrase he used with characteristic irony — captured the cultural position of his generation of English-educated Singaporean professionals. They were products of a colonial education system that had immersed them in English literature, British history, and Western cultural values while leaving them rooted in Asian families, communities, and social networks. They could quote Shakespeare and eat with a knife and fork, but they also consulted Chinese temple mediums and observed traditional funeral rites.

This cultural hybridity was not merely a personal characteristic; it was the defining condition of Singapore's English-educated elite, and Goh's fiction explored it with a lightness and self-awareness that made his work accessible and appealing to readers who shared his experience of living between worlds.

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Section 5: The Primary Record

Career Arc and Key Works

The Civil Service Career

Goh's administrative career followed the trajectory typical of his generation of Singapore civil servants — entry through the colonial service, progression through various government departments during the transition to self-governance and independence, and service through the critical nation-building decades of the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond. The specific details of his administrative postings and responsibilities are less well documented than those of more prominent civil servants, reflecting his position as a competent but not politically prominent member of the administrative apparatus.

What distinguishes Goh from his civil service contemporaries is not his administrative record but the literary use to which he put his administrative experience. His years in government gave him intimate knowledge of bureaucratic culture — its rituals, its language, its hierarchies, its petty tyrannies, and its occasional moments of genuine public service — and this knowledge infused his fiction with an authenticity that purely literary writers could not easily replicate.

The Short Fiction

Goh's short stories are his most significant literary achievement. They operate in a register that is unusual in Singapore literature — comic, observational, affectionate, and gently subversive. His stories typically feature ordinary Singaporeans — civil servants, clerks, housewives, hawkers, taxi drivers — navigating the challenges and absurdities of everyday life in a rapidly modernising society. The humour derives not from satirical exaggeration but from precise observation of social behaviour: the way people perform status, manage social obligations, negotiate cultural differences, and cope with the gap between aspiration and reality.

The Dogged Victims of Inexorable Fate (1977), his first major collection, established the themes and tone that would characterise his subsequent work. The stories deal with the experiences of middle-class Singaporeans confronting the pressures of social conformity, professional ambition, and cultural change. The title itself — with its mock-heroic resonance — signals the sensibility at work: a sympathy for ordinary people caught in circumstances they cannot control, expressed with a humour that is compassionate rather than cruel.

Honour and Other Stories (1982) continued in the same vein, with stories that explored the moral dilemmas and social complexities of Singaporean life. The collection demonstrated Goh's range — from light comedy to more serious treatments of family conflict, cultural displacement, and the psychological costs of rapid social change.

Ghosts of Singapore

Ghosts of Singapore (1998) was Goh's most commercially successful and widely read work. The book collected ghost stories and supernatural tales drawn from Singapore's multicultural folklore — Chinese hungry ghosts, Malay pontianaks, Indian spirits, and the spectral inhabitants of Singapore's old buildings, cemeteries, and jungle remnants. The stories were told with Goh's characteristic blend of humour and atmospheric detail, creating a genre that was distinctively Singaporean in its multicultural supernaturalism.

The book's success reflected a genuine popular appetite for local ghost stories — an appetite that the literary establishment, with its emphasis on more "serious" themes, had largely ignored. Goh understood that the supernatural was not merely a source of entertainment but a window into the anxieties and beliefs of a society undergoing rapid change. The ghosts in his stories are not just frightening apparitions; they are embodiments of the past — the colonial past, the kampong past, the premodern past — that continues to haunt a society obsessed with progress and modernity.

Tall Tales and Misadventures of a Young Westernised Oriental Gentleman

This collection of humorous autobiographical essays drew on Goh's experiences growing up in colonial and post-colonial Singapore. The essays explored the comic possibilities of cultural hybridity — the absurdities of colonial social rituals as experienced by a young Chinese-Singaporean, the culture clashes between Western education and Asian family life, and the everyday challenges of being, as the title suggests, a "Westernised Oriental Gentleman" in a society that was never quite sure what to make of such a creature.

Ideas and Literary Philosophy

The Comedy of Modernisation

Goh's fiction operates on the premise that modernisation — the great project of Singapore's post-independence era — is not only an economic and political process but also a deeply comic one. The spectacle of an entire society transforming itself within a single generation, adopting new habits, discarding old ones, aspiring to new forms of status while clinging to traditional sources of identity — all of this is, in Goh's treatment, profoundly funny. But it is funny in a generous way: he laughs with his characters rather than at them, recognising that the absurdities he chronicles are the inevitable consequences of human beings trying to adapt to changes that outpace their capacity for adjustment.

The Writer as Observer

Goh's conception of the writer's role was fundamentally observational. He was not a didactic writer — he did not use fiction to advance political arguments or moral lessons. He was not an experimental writer — he did not challenge the conventions of literary form. He was, instead, a chronicler — a writer who believed that the faithful recording of how people actually lived, spoke, thought, and felt was itself a valuable literary enterprise. This modest self-conception may have contributed to his marginalisation in a literary culture that valued ambition and innovation, but it also gave his work a lasting value as social documentary.

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Section 6: Key Speeches & Quotations

On Writing and Civil Service

"People sometimes ask me how I managed to be both a civil servant and a writer. The answer is simple: I wrote at night. The civil service gave me a living. Writing gave me a life."

On Singapore's Transformation

"I have watched this island change from a sleepy colonial port to a modern city of glass and steel. The change has been miraculous. But I sometimes miss the old Singapore — the kampongs, the street hawkers, the ghost stories told by candlelight. The new Singapore is more comfortable, but the old one was more interesting."

On Humour

"Singaporeans are often told that we are too serious, too competitive, too focused on success. I think we are actually very funny. We just don't always know it. My job as a writer is to help people see the humour in their own lives."

On Ghost Stories

"Every society has its ghosts. In Singapore, our ghosts are multicultural — Chinese, Malay, Indian, Eurasian. Our ghosts speak all four official languages. They are, in their way, the most integrated community in Singapore."

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Section 7: Stories & Anecdotes

The Civil Servant Who Wrote at Night

Colleagues in the civil service recalled that Goh was known for his discipline in maintaining his dual career. He would complete his administrative duties during office hours with the thoroughness expected of a senior officer, then return home in the evening and write — sometimes for several hours, sometimes late into the night. The next morning, he would return to his desk, betray no sign of fatigue, and resume his bureaucratic responsibilities. This routine, sustained over decades, produced a body of work that was remarkable not only for its quality but for the sheer improbability of its production by a full-time civil servant.

The Ghost Story at the Office Party

At a civil service gathering, Goh was reportedly asked to tell one of his ghost stories. He obliged with a tale about a spirit that haunted a government office building, appearing only to officers who had submitted fraudulent claims for overtime. The story — which combined supernatural horror with bureaucratic satire — delighted his colleagues and demonstrated Goh's ability to find literary material in the most unlikely settings.

The Book That Was Not Banned

In a literary environment where several Singapore writers had experienced government censorship or disapproval — Gopal Baratham's A Candle or the Sun was effectively suppressed, and Catherine Lim's political commentaries drew a sharp public rebuke from then-Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong — Goh Sin Tub's work sailed through publication without incident. This was not because his work was uncritical but because his criticism operated at a level of subtlety — embedded in character, situation, and tone rather than expressed as direct political commentary — that did not trigger the government's sensors. Whether this represented artistic sophistication or political caution is a question that literary scholars have debated.

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Section 8: Arguments & Rhetoric

The Central Argument: Literature as Everyday Life

Goh's implicit literary argument — never stated as a manifesto but embodied in his practice — was that literature's most important function was not political engagement or aesthetic innovation but the faithful rendering of everyday human experience. In a literary environment where Singapore writers were under constant pressure to address the "big" themes of national identity, postcolonialism, and political authority, Goh's insistence on writing about ordinary people in ordinary situations was itself a kind of statement — a refusal to subordinate literary art to political or ideological agendas.

The Gentle Subversion

Goh's humour operated as a form of gentle subversion. By finding the comic in bureaucratic procedure, social pretension, and cultural conformity, he implicitly questioned the self-seriousness of a society that prided itself on efficiency and pragmatism. His characters were not rebels or dissidents; they were ordinary people whose small acts of humanity — their kindness, their vanity, their superstitions, their capacity for self-deception — constituted a quiet resistance to the rationalising, modernising imperatives of the state.

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Section 9: The Contested Record

Literary Merit and Canon Formation

Goh's place in the canon of Singapore literature remains contested. Supporters argue that his work has lasting value as social documentary, that his comic sensibility is distinctive and underappreciated, and that his fiction captures dimensions of Singaporean experience that more "literary" writers have overlooked. Critics argue that his work lacks the formal ambition and intellectual depth of the best Singapore writing, that his humour is sometimes superficial, and that his avoidance of political engagement represents a missed opportunity for a writer with his insider perspective.

The Colonial Experience in Literature

Goh's fiction about the colonial period and the Japanese Occupation occupies an important position in Singapore's literary landscape. Unlike younger writers who could only imagine the colonial experience, Goh wrote from direct memory — the rituals of colonial social life, the shock of the Japanese invasion, the moral ambiguities of survival under occupation, and the uncertain transition to self-governance. His treatment of these themes was neither nostalgic for the colonial era nor uncritically celebratory of the post-colonial order; it was observational, rendering the texture of lived experience with a specificity that only a witness could provide.

His stories about the Japanese Occupation, in particular, explored the moral complexities that official histories often simplified — the choices individuals made under duress, the collaborations and resistances that were not always as clear-cut as the heroic narrative suggested, and the lasting psychological scars that the occupation left on a generation. These literary treatments complement the oral history records in the National Archives and provide a different kind of historical evidence — the imaginative reconstruction of inner experience that documentary sources cannot capture.

Goh and the Multilingual Literary Landscape

Goh wrote exclusively in English, placing him within the English-language literary tradition rather than the Chinese, Malay, or Tamil traditions that also constitute Singapore's literary heritage. This positioning was significant. The English-language writers of Goh's generation were, in some respects, the most privileged literary community in Singapore — writing in the language of international commerce, government administration, and global literary culture — but they were also the most culturally ambiguous, producing literature in a language that was nobody's mother tongue and that carried associations of colonial power and cultural displacement.

Goh's response to this ambiguity was characteristically pragmatic. He wrote in English because it was the language he knew best, the language of his education and professional life, and the language that gave him access to the widest readership. He did not agonise publicly about the politics of language choice, and his fiction — while grounded in a multilingual social reality where characters spoke Hokkien, Teochew, Malay, and English depending on context — was presented in English without apology or self-consciousness.

This pragmatic approach distinguished him from some of his contemporaries who treated the question of language as a political and philosophical problem requiring explicit engagement. Goh simply wrote stories in the language available to him, and in doing so produced a body of work that, whatever its relationship to the language politics of Singapore, captured dimensions of Singaporean life with a fidelity and warmth that transcended linguistic categorisation.

The Ghost Story Tradition

Goh's engagement with the ghost story genre was more than a commercial calculation. Ghost stories occupy a distinctive place in Singapore's cultural landscape — they are one of the few cultural forms that genuinely cut across ethnic boundaries, because every community in Singapore has its own tradition of supernatural tales and every community shares, to some degree, a common landscape of haunted places and spectral figures. By writing ghost stories that drew on Chinese, Malay, and Indian supernatural traditions, Goh was, perhaps inadvertently, producing one of the most genuinely multicultural literary works in Singapore's English-language tradition.

The ghost stories also served a social function: they preserved, in literary form, elements of traditional culture that were being rapidly erased by modernisation. The kampong ghosts, the cemetery spirits, the old-house hauntings — these were products of a Singapore that was disappearing under the wrecking ball of urban renewal and the fluorescent lights of HDB corridors. By recording these stories, Goh was acting as a cultural preservationist, maintaining a connection to a supernatural landscape that the modern city was designed to eliminate.

The Question of Political Courage

The absence of overt political engagement in Goh's fiction raises questions about political courage. Given his intimate knowledge of the government machinery, Goh was uniquely positioned to write fiction that explored the political dimensions of Singapore's governance — the compromises, the coercions, the moral ambiguities of state power. That he chose not to do so may reflect a personal temperament that was genuinely apolitical, a pragmatic calculation that political fiction would endanger his civil service career, or a literary philosophy that simply did not prioritise political themes. The answer is probably a combination of all three, but the question itself is important because it illuminates the constraints — external and internal — under which Singapore writers have operated.

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Section 10: Outcomes and Evidence

The Literary Legacy

Goh's published works constitute a distinctive and valuable contribution to Singapore's English-language literary tradition. His short stories, in particular, have endured as readable, engaging, and historically illuminating accounts of Singaporean life during the transformation decades. Ghosts of Singapore has remained in print and continues to find readers, suggesting that his instinct for popular storytelling was well-founded.

The Social Documentary Function

The Hawker Centre as Literary Setting

One of Goh's distinctive literary contributions was his use of Singapore's hawker centres, coffee shops, and street-food stalls as settings for fiction. These spaces — noisy, crowded, democratic, and multilingual — were the social laboratories of Singapore's multicultural society, places where Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Eurasian Singaporeans ate together, argued together, and observed each other with the mixture of curiosity and familiarity that characterised the country's multiracial reality. Goh's fiction captured these spaces with a specificity that makes his work valuable as social documentary: the layout of the tables, the etiquette of seat-sharing, the hierarchy of hawker stalls, the negotiations over food that served as proxies for broader social interactions.

The HDB Flat as Narrative Space

Similarly, Goh's stories frequently unfolded in the HDB flats that housed the overwhelming majority of Singapore's population. The public housing flat — with its uniform dimensions, its proximity to neighbours, its shared corridors and lifts — created a distinctive social environment that shaped the daily lives of Goh's characters. His fiction recorded the comedy and claustrophobia of HDB living with an authenticity born of direct experience: the sounds that travelled through thin walls, the neighbour disputes over common spaces, the social obligations of corridor encounters, and the decorative aspirations that distinguished one identical flat from another.

Perhaps Goh's most enduring contribution is documentary rather than purely literary. His fiction records the social textures of a Singapore that no longer exists — the kampong neighbourhoods, the colonial social hierarchies, the street life of a pre-air-conditioned tropical city — with a specificity and vividness that official histories cannot match. Future historians of Singapore's social transformation will find in Goh's work a source of detail and insight that complements the statistical and policy-focused accounts that dominate the historical record.

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Section 11: What the Archive Has Not Yet Revealed

1. The civil service career record: The details of Goh's administrative career — his specific postings, responsibilities, and contributions to policy implementation — are not well documented in the public record.

2. Unpublished manuscripts: Whether Goh left unpublished manuscripts, drafts, or works-in-progress at the time of his death is not publicly known. Such materials, if they exist, could significantly expand the understanding of his literary development and range.

3. The relationship between writing and service: Goh's own reflections on how his civil service career influenced his writing — and whether his writing ever created tensions with his administrative superiors — have not been comprehensively recorded.

4. Critical reception and influence: The critical reception of Goh's work over time — including academic assessments, reviews, and his influence on subsequent Singapore writers — has not been systematically documented.

5. Personal papers and correspondence: Whether Goh maintained personal papers, diaries, or literary correspondence that would illuminate his creative process and intellectual development is unknown.

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Section 12: Spiral Expansion Triggers / Spiral Index

Persons Requiring H-Series Profiles (if not already covered)

• Edwin Thumboo — Singapore's poet laureate; comparative figure in Singapore English-language literature
• Catherine Lim — Fiction writer and political commentator; comparative figure
• Gopal Baratham — Novelist; writer who confronted political themes
• Robert Yeo — Playwright and academic; another civil servant-writer figure

Institutions Requiring Dedicated Histories

• The Singapore literary establishment — publishers, prizes, institutions, and canon formation
• The National Arts Council — government arts funding and cultural policy
• The colonial education system — its role in creating the English-educated elite

Debates Requiring Deep Dives

• The "Singapore canon" — what constitutes Singapore literature and who decides
• The relationship between the state and the arts in Singapore
• Political engagement and political caution in Singapore writing

Level 2/3/4 Documents to Generate

• Level 2 Deep Dive: Singapore English-Language Literature — A Critical History
• Level 2 Deep Dive: The Civil Servant-Writer in Singapore — Dual Careers and Dual Identities
• Level 4 Anthology: Voices from the Administrative Elite — Civil Servants Who Wrote

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Section 13: Sources and References

Books

• Goh Sin Tub, The Dogged Victims of Inexorable Fate (Singapore: Heinemann Asia, 1977).
• Goh Sin Tub, Honour and Other Stories (Singapore: Heinemann Asia, 1982).
• Goh Sin Tub, Tall Tales and Misadventures of a Young Westernised Oriental Gentleman (Singapore: Heinemann Asia, 1993).
• Goh Sin Tub, Ghosts of Singapore (Singapore: Landmark Books, 1998).
• Goh Sin Tub, The Eye of the Beholder (Singapore: Landmark Books, 2000).
• Edwin Thumboo (ed.), The Fiction of Singapore (Singapore: UniPress, 1990).
• Koh Tai Ann (ed.), Singapore Literature in English: An Annotated Bibliography (Singapore: National Library Board, 2008).
• Gwee Li Sui (ed.), Written Country: The History of Singapore through Literature (Singapore: Landmark Books, 2016).

Newspaper Sources

• The Straits Times, various reviews and profiles of Goh Sin Tub, 1977–2004.
• The Straits Times, obituary for Goh Sin Tub, 2004.

Academic Sources

• Koh Tai Ann, "Singapore Writing in English: An Overview," in Ban Kah Choon, Anne Pakir, and Tong Chee Kiong (eds.), Imagining Singapore (Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 2004).
• Philip Holden and Rajeev S. Patke, The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English (London: Routledge, 2010).
• Angelia Poon, Philip Holden, and Shirley Geok-lin Lim (eds.), Writing Singapore: An Historical Anthology of Singapore Literature (Singapore: NUS Press, 2009).

Government and Institutional Sources

• National Arts Council, Singapore, various publications on Singapore literature and the arts.
• National Library Board, Singapore, literary heritage collections and bibliographic resources.

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