Jon Gresham is the author of Gus: The Life & Opinions of the Last Raffles’ Banded Langur (Epigram Books 2024) and We Rose Up Slowly (Math Paper Press 2015). Gus was a finalist for the 2023 Epigram Books Fiction Prize.
His writing has also appeared in various publications including Best Singaporean Short Stories 1 (Epigram Books 2020) and The Best Asian Short Stories 2020 (Kitaab 2020). His story 'The Visit' was shortlisted for the 2020 Short Fiction/Essex University Prize and included in Best New Singaporean Short Stories Volume 5 (Epigram Books 2021). He also co-edited In This Desert There Were Seeds (Ethos Books and Margaret River Press 2019), a collection of stories by West Australian and Singaporean writers.
Born of mixed heritage in Manchester, United Kingdom, he is the adopted son of a passing union between a Shropshire schoolteacher and a Chinese student taking an extra-mural course in Chinese Philosophy at an English University. Gresham emigrated to Adelaide as a child, worked in Sydney, and left Australia in 1999 to work on corporate restructurings in Thailand in the aftermath of the Asian economic crisis. In 2014, Gresham left the corporate world to write, study and work with arts organisers, readers and writers in Singapore.
Gresham received his LLB/BEc from the University of Adelaide and his MA in English Literature with a specialisation in Creative Writing from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
From 2019 to 2023 he ran the Asia Creative Writing Programme, a collaboration between The School of Humanities at the Nanyang Technological University, and the National Arts Council of Singapore. He is a co-founder of Sing Lit Station, and founded Book A Writer.
Gresham is working on several novels and a short story collection, and has lived in Singapore for over twenty years.
His photography blog can be found at igloomelts.com.
“In this first collection, Gresham, conscious and cosmopolitan mongrel writer of the world, seems to have broken key ground and taken the Singapore short story into a newer, freer, adaptably post-national, and highly readable space.”
Reviews & Media
“Thrilling tale of talking monkey and Primate Warfare”, The Sunday Times, 16 June 2024
”The novel is, most fascinatingly, a marvellous geography of Singapore’s urban and gardened landscape.“Gresham has created a compelling speculative setting around Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, Clementi Forest, the Rail Corridor, Blair Road and other locales, populating a world with multi-species life that allows the non-human to narrate the city.
“It is an action-packed, page-turning novel that reveals the author’s fecund imagination of a Singapore which loses control.
“In part, this can be read as a parable about climate change and the complete inversion of human-animal dynamics. On the other hand, it can also be understood as a pandemic novel, revealing how human domination is already complicit in the making of a less habitable world for all planetary life. “
4 Star Review by Shawn Hoo in The Sunday TimesProust Questionnaire: 17 Questions with Jon Gresham, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, April 2022
From an Investment Bank to a Writing desk: An Interview with Jon Gresham, StyleGuide, July 2018
“Gresham’s surrealism is a welcome mutation of social realist storytelling that dominates the short story market in Singapore. We Rose Up Slowly seems to fall somewhere on a spectrum between the speculative fiction of Victor Fernando R. Ocampo, whose work is also a fusion of Borgesian fantasy and science fiction, and Amanda Lee Koe’s blend of semi-surreal social realism and folklore. To label this collection would be doing an injustice to a work that understands the sense of displacement one feels as a hybridised individual — one that ticks many boxes on administrative forms and belongs to none of them, one that finds themselves with a more expansive sense of self and art.”
Review of We Rose Up Slowly, Anomaly Blog, June 2018
Migrant Voices, A-List, January 2018
“I think a more cautious, Monty Python acclimatised reader will pick up on the slightly un-Singaporean humour, the nuances, as well as the uncanny interconnecting echoes between the stories. Anyway, I doubt Gresham feels the need as writer to reveal any fundamental truths, or teach us how to live as good Singaporeans. A more weighty critical voice, Jee Leong Koh, who was dismissive of Arthur Yap’s short stories, has nothing but praise for Gresham’s collection. And not without reason. There’s rich language, much stuff going on here: enough for a dissertation surely – in fact the more I read these stories the more I’m reminded of Nalpon, but perhaps even more of Amanda Lee Koe. As with these line-crossing local writers in all senses, in Gresham, something resonant is generated in the gentle vibrations between the very local mundane and the magical.”
Review of We Rose Up Slowly, Asiatic, Vol 11, No1, June 2017
The Lounge Interview, 10 Questions With Jon Gresham, Kitaab, Feb 2016
Expat Living Singapore Oct 2015
Singapore Bookshelf, The Straits Times July 2015
Media Kit
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Jon Gresham is the author of Gus: The Life & Opinions of the Last Raffles’ Banded Langur (Shortlisted for the 2023 Epigram Books Fiction Prize) and We Rose Up Slowly (Math Paper Press 2015).
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Jon Gresham is the author of Gus: The Life & Opinions of the Last Raffles’ Banded Langur (Shortlisted for the 2023 Epigram Books Fiction Prize) and We Rose Up Slowly (Math Paper Press 2015). His story 'The Visit' was shortlisted for the 2020 Short Fiction/Essex University Prize.
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Jon Gresham is the author of Gus: The Life & Opinions of the Last Raffles’ Banded Langur (Shortlisted for the 2023 Epigram Books Fiction Prize) and We Rose Up Slowly (Math Paper Press 2015). His writing has appeared in various publications and his story 'The Visit' was shortlisted for the 2020 Short Fiction/Essex University Prize. He also co-edited In This Desert There Were Seeds (Ethos Books and Margaret River Press, 2019).
He ran the Asia Creative Writing Programme, a collaboration between The School of Humanities at the Nanyang Technological University, and the Singapore National Arts Council from 2019 to 2023. He is a co-founder of Sing Lit Station, and founded Book A Writer.
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Jon Gresham is the author of Gus: The Life & Opinions of the Last Raffles’ Banded Langur (Shortlisted for the 2023 Epigram Books Fiction Prize) and We Rose Up Slowly (Math Paper Press 2015). His writing has appeared in various publications including The Best Asian Short Stories 2020 (Kitaab 2020) and Best Singaporean Short Stories 1 (Epigram Books 2020). His story 'The Visit' was shortlisted for the 2020 Short Fiction/Essex University Prize and included in Best New Singaporean Short Stories Volume 5 (Epigram Books 2021). He also co-edited with Elisabeth Tan In This Desert There Were Seeds (Ethos Books and Margaret River Press, 2019), a collection of stories by West Australian and Singaporean writers.
From 2019 to 2023 he ran the Asia Creative Writing Programme, a collaboration between The School of Humanities at the Nanyang Technological University, and the Singapore National Arts Council. He is a co-founder of Sing Lit Station, and founded Book A Writer.
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