Daren Shiau is a fiction writer, poet and lawyer in private practice. He has been described by The Arts Magazine as "among the most exciting of the post-1965 generation of writers" and cited by the travel guide Lonely Planet as the author of the "definitive Singapore novel". Shiau is an author of four books, including Heartland, a novel which has been a prescribed English literature text of the Singapore-Cambridge GCE "O" level syllabus and required reading under a programme at SOAS, University of London. Given the National Arts Council's Young Artist of the Year in 2002, Daren has been invited to read in New York, Boston, London and Sydney. The prose poems in this issue of Cha are from Shiau's fourth book, Velouria. [Read]