Epigram Books
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Epigram Books

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Epigram Books

Epigram Books is an independent publishing company in Singapore. It publishes works of Singapore-based writers, poets and playwrights.

Epigram was founded in 1991 by Edmund Wee as a design agency. Epigram began the publishing and designing of annual reports before expanding its portfolio to include more diverse design work such as wayfinding, corporate logo branding, and graphic design. Notable clients of Epigram include OCBC Bank, Singapore Airlines, Media Development Authority and CapitaLand.

Epigram has won international awards for their designs of annual reports, including the Hong Kong Design Awards and the Graphis Gold Award for Annual Reports. They are the first company in the world to win the Grand Prix award at the Red Dot consecutively. They received commissions for commemorative books from agencies such as the National Trades Union Congress and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The company Epigram Books, the publishing arm of Epigram set up in 1999, published its first book with mountaineer David Lim’s Mountain to Climb: The Quest for Everest and Beyond. Epigram Books bore the design and printing costs of the book and sold five thousand copies. Epigram Books was incorporated as a separate entity from the parent company in July 2011.

In 2015, Epigram Books launched a fiction prize, the Epigram Books Fiction Prize, with an award of $20,000. The first edition was won by O Thiam Chin.

In January 2021 Epigram Books, which set up its London arm in November 2016, announced it would stop publishing in the United Kingdom in order to shore up its Singapore business amid the COVID-19 slowdown.

Epigram Books has published a series of cookbooks, under the Heritage Cookbook series. In 2010, it published There’s No Carrot in Carrot Cake, a guide book to Singapore’s street food (or hawker food in colloquial terms). The book sparked a debate in the media about the need for a culinary school to preserve Singapore’s food heritage.

A short story, Moving Forward, included in the compilation of Andrew Tan's Monsters, Miracles & Mayonnaise was nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Short Story in 2013. Monsters, Miracles & Mayonnaise is one of the three graphic novels that was published by the company in 2012. Epigram Books is also the first Singaporean publishing house to have a comic book nominated for this prize. Another graphic novel, Ten Sticks and One Rice by Oh Yong Hwee and Koh Hong Teng won an International MANGA Award (Bronze) in 2014.

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