their literary development forcibly redirected in its course by politics, as Singaporean literature was by the separation of Singapore from Malaysia on 9 August 1965. Until the peninsula of Malaya attained independence from the British on 31 August 1957, Singapore and Malaya had been governed as one political entity. In 1959, Singapore had become an internally self-governing colony, the British taking responsibility for defence. In 1963, Singapore, together with Sabah and Sarawak, became member states of the newly formed Federation of Malaysia. With the island's departure from Malaysia in August 1965 to become a republic, the literature of Singapore assumed its own path, after several decades of literary commonality with its peninsular neighbour. The shared beginnings of this literature in English can be traced to the University of Malaya in Singapore, where small groups of undergraduates had come together to discuss writing and to write creatively.1 It was primarily poetry that was discussed, written, and published, either in anthologies or subsequently in individual collections.2 When fiction first came to be published, it was similarly as anthologies of short stories.3 It is not difficult to explain the preeminence of poetry over short fiction from the sixties and even into the eighties. Aspiring writers could have found it less inhibiting and formidable a task to produce thirty or more poems for a collection, where a novel would have required a social setting and a cast of characters whose lives had to be followed over several hundred pages. Drama was then dominated by productions of Western plays by theatre groups on campus, and from the British Armed Forces stationed in Singapore. Where the poet was free to explore the landscapes of his mind, as Edwin Thumboo indicates, the inadequate variety of social types in a nascent society disadvantages both the fictionist and dramatist: 'The fiction cannot go beyond the parameters set by the material. And the material will grow only as a society expands, as life expands (Thumboo, v). The creatio of short fiction which marks the beginnings of Singaporean fiction in English may also be viewed as a product of the insecurity or absence of a fictive tradition which makes the rendering of episodic narratives the preferred form. Writers like Catherine Lim, Goh Sin Tub, and Lim Thean Soo probably felt comfortable with the manageable demands of short stories, which could also provide the training ground for the novels they would subs quently write.4