Look at this person

This May, City Bookstore published Look at This Man, the posthumous work of Mr. Ying Pei'an, a prominent Xinhua writer. This collection marks his first essay collection. The selection, table of contents, and preface were prepared by Ying Pei'an before his death. The collection includes 11 essays written and published in newspapers and periodicals between 1973 and 2020, as well as a speech written for a symposium at the 2007 Hong Kong Book Fair.

This collection of essays takes its title from the German philosopher Nietzsche's autobiography, Ecce Homo. Ying Pei'an uses Nietzsche's perseverance in writing despite his illness and frailty in his later years to inspire himself, who is also facing illness, and to reflect on his own writing journey.

The majority of the essays in this book were written between the 1970s and 1990s and published in Nanyang Siang Pau and Lianhe Zaobao. They reveal the youthful Ying Pei'an's rich and nuanced emotions, his life ideals, and his deeply held beliefs and values. Aside from the 2007 speech, which has yet to be published locally, two of his more recent works, "To a Friend I Haven't Spoken With for a Long Time" and "Silence Is Golden," have also remained unpublished. The former expresses Ying Pei'an's aspirations for freedom and democracy, while the latter reflects his reflections on the meaning of life. Both are worth reading.

Yingpeian

A 2003 Cultural Medallion winner, he was the inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Nanyang Technological University in 2013, and in October of that year was awarded the Southeast Asian Literary Prize. In 2018, he was selected as a pioneer writer in the Writers of the Year selection.

He has published 28 books. His novel A Man Like Me won the 1987/88 Book Award, The Turmoil won the 2004 Singapore Literature Award, A Few Things About Myself won the 2008 Singapore Literature Award, The Studio won the 2012 Singapore Literature Award, The Costumes won the 2016 Singapore Literature Award, and The Colour of Dusk was selected as the 2019 Lianhe Zaobao Book of the Year.

With the exception of The Colour of Dusk, all of Ying Pei-an's published novels are available in English translation. The Studio was published in Italian in October 2013 and was adapted into a stage play in 2017, opening the Singapore International Arts Festival that year.