The backdrop of some of the images in this story is a diorama that animates an epic scene from the Chinese folk tale Legend of the White Snake. The display is one of more than 150 in Haw Par Villa, a cultural park that depicts portrayals of Chinese folklore and myths rooted in traditional standards of morality, and elements from Buddhism and other religions. Established in 1937 by Tiger Balm’s co‐creator Aw Boon Haw, the park melds the weird and the wonderful.

It is a fitting setting given Sister Snake’s context, which tells of two sisters who lead starkly different lives in New York and Singapore. Su, a conservative politician’s wife, and Emerald, a hedonistic sugar baby, share a secret past as serpentine beings from China’s Tang dynasty. The plot thickens when Su convinces Emerald to relocate to Singapore. The narrative encapsulates the struggle between conformity and individuality—mirroring the societal dichotomies Lee Koe often critiques.

The author says it feels like this book has been brewing in her since she was eight, when she first encountered Hong Kong film‐maker Tsui Hark’s “campy wuxia (martial arts) films”, including the 1993 film Green Snake, starring Maggie Cheung and Joey Wong. “As a child, [these characters] struck me in an instinctive way,” she shares, adding that she felt a particular affinity towards yaojings, the Chinese term for demon spirits who can shape‐shift between human and animal forms. “I found them alluring. I was always upset whenever they had to conceal their powers to fit in with their society or household. Where do the expectations of others meet our own desires?”

Lee Koe views the novel as a tribute to these figures. “It’s a restitution of all these women who have had to conform [throughout history],” she explains. “Writing is the way I remake a world that wasn’t made for someone like me to flourish, the way I choose to call the status quo into question, and the way I hope to expand boundaries for those that will come after me.” She emphasises that themes of autonomy and agency are central to her work and life, reflecting on the restrictive ways in which girls are often taught to “toe the line, keep [their] heads low and not stand out.”

These themes find parallels in her debut novel Delayed Rays of a Star, which follows cinema icons Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong and Leni Riefenstahl through an extensive historical narrative that interweaves timelines and locations. The story drew inspiration from a 1928 photograph of them at a Berlin soirée, which Lee Koe discovered at The Strand bookshop in New York. Dietrich’s character particularly resonated with Lee Koe as she was her teenage obsession, and on the cover of Tatler Singapore this month, she emulates the German-American actress and singer in a tuxedo, as an homage to her “proto queer role model” who defies traditional definitions of femininity and gender.

Lee Koe’s fascination with Weimar Berlin (an era of artistic and intellectual innovation during the interwar period from 1919 to 1933), all things vintage, and cabaret—her “spaces of fantasy channelled in the novel—found a real‐world counterpart in her recent year‐long residency in Berlin. This city, a nucleus of underground culture and a long‐cherished dream destination for her, offered a freeing experience, especially due to the DAAD Artists‐in‐Berlin Program’s unique approach. “They trust you to spend your time however you want, without needing proof of written or artistic work. Even if you were spending your time hitting the clubs or just wandering the streets, they trust that it’ll somehow imprint [on] you and seep into your practice,” she says, praising Berlin’s view of culture as essential, not a luxury.

Her residency significantly shaped her second iteration of A Cyborg Island Manifesto, a performance lecture that operates from a position of subversion of normative narratives. First presented at National Gallery Singapore in 2022, it was adapted into a strip lecture for its second iteration held last year at Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art. “Berlin left a profound mark on me,” she notes, valuing its openness to body expression and kink culture. “I partied quite a bit there, which has a very kink‐positive club culture. I like bringing two seemingly incompatible entities together to create new contexts.”

Lee Koe admired the diversity she witnessed in Berlin’s clubs and gigs, from elderly couples dressed in full leather to wheelchair users on the dance floor. “It was beautiful to see that there are so many ways of being. I wish we saw occurrences like that in Singapore, where it organically feels like many different bodies can exist together.” This experience, she notes, brought a new bodily awareness, one she sometimes finds lacking in the solitary and cerebral practice of composing a novel.

In the lecture, Lee Koe re‐examines Singapore’s approach to rapid urban renewal. “Whenever I return, I’ll inevitably pass a street and be completely disoriented because something that once existed is no longer there. It sometimes feels like the carpet is always being pulled out from under your feet,” she says. A Cyborg Island Manifesto creatively reinterprets these concepts of change and progress. “It’s about introducing a different framework that questions and reshapes our national identity,” she explains.

Sister Snake likewise reveals her complicated feelings about her homeland. Does it feel like a homecoming? “It actually does,” she says. “I love Singapore inextricably, but it sometimes has a hyper‐cautious way of fencing you in with micro‐regulations, putatively for your own good,” she observes. “Sister Snake is [also] a homecoming in a deeper sense: it chafes against this binary of conformity versus freedom. What are the parts of ourselves we give up in order to fit in?”

Lee Koe’s defiance of conventions blossomed alongside her love of the written word, sparked by her father’s gift of the Brontë sisters’ novels when she was in primary school. “They were probably beyond me, but I consumed them voraciously,” she recalls with a laugh. Writing was always part of her life, in “genre‐agnostic” forms that included inventive detective case files and fictitious pen pal letters, crafted with her mother. Her creativity extended to fantasy tales, and even erotic stories and lingerie catalogues she co‐created with a school friend.

Post‐university graduation, she experienced what she calls a “quarter‐life existential crisis” that led her to explore various unconventional roles, as she could not see herself working a nine‐to‐five desk job. “I learnt dress‐making from a granny in Katong Shopping Centre and sold [the dresses] on Etsy. I also applied to be a burlesque dancer at clubs in Germany and Australia, and an au pair to a couple in Barcelona,” she shares.

While waitressing and freelancing for a creative agency, she had an epiphany. “I [truly] wanted to write, rather than jump through all these hoops. It was an awakening that I should write uncompromisingly,” she recalls. This realisation marked the beginning of her writing career, culminating in her first stories for Ministry of Moral Panic and earning her the title of the youngest winner of the Singapore Literature Prize in 2014.

Her commitment to writing led her to New York, a city that mirrors her creative spirit. “It’s a magical city for many. For a writer in particular, it’s a storied place. It’s where I wanted to grow as an author and a person. There’s something about New York that’s very ‘live and let live’, and there’s a lot of latitude for autonomy and ambition. You can be whatever you want to be [in this] non-judgemental space,” she says. Living in cities that align with one’s values, she argues, offers greater mental clarity. “You’re able to have a closer relationship to your dreams. It impacts not just your work, but [also] the way you go about your day or carry yourself or talk to people,” she points out.

Nevertheless, she emphasises the importance of flexibility for a writer: “If you’re a writer, you should be able to write anywhere. I try to not be too precious about the perfect place or setting. If you require that, it impedes [your work].” Sharing an example of this adaptability, she says: “When accompanying my partner and film‐maker Kirsten [Tan] to Thailand while she was shooting her feature film, I found myself writing in a field in a small town, despite the intense 40 degrees Celcius heat.”

As a filmmaker-and-author pairing, Lee Koe observes that she and Tan “are very different, but cosmically aligned”. She explains: “It’s wonderful because she loves books and I love films. We both take our craft super seriously, yet we don’t take ourselves seriously at all. There’s a chemistry between us that is easy and incandescent at the same time.”

Reflecting on her decade‐long journey as an author, Lee Koe shares that she had not initially envisioned writing as a career path. “It didn’t occur to me that somebody like me could also be an author,” she muses. Her recent accomplishment of landing a six‐figure deal for Sister Snake is not just a personal triumph, but also a cause for celebration in the literary world, especially for voices that have long been on the fringes. “An artist’s life is an unstable one and it has been a hard‐fought journey to get to a point where my writing can sustain me,” she explains. “But I wouldn’t have it any other way because having to pave your own way forward is a true test of fortitude and ingenuity.”

This understanding partly fuelled her decision to agree to this story. “When I was growing up, I never saw anyone like myself on a magazine cover. Having no role models makes your dreams feel outsized and remote, like they’re beyond the realm of possibility. Representation shapes reality,” she asserts.

Her influence extends far beyond her written words. “Over the years, people have unexpectedly come up to me—kooky girls, aspiring writers, baby queers, headstrong individuals who don’t fit a given mould—to tell me that [my life trajectory] has made them feel like there’s more room for the ways in which they want to exist too,” she says. “It’s an amazing thing to realise that just by holding your own centre uncompromisingly, you’re creating space for others to carve out their own destiny.”

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