Olivia Ho
As seen in:
MDPI,
The Straits Times,
Teen Vogue,
The Star (Malaysia),
AsiaOne,
YR Media,
SilverKris,
Red Hot Singapore
@ucl English Language & Literature PhD candidate, formerly Straits Times Life arts and books editor. All views here are my own.
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Articles by Olivia Ho
Singapore scenes shine at London Tate Modern exhibition on birth of art photography
Wu Peng Seng’s Construction (1958) depicts a worker silhouetted against girders at the old Paya Lebar Airport. PHOTO: WU PENG SENG Singapore’s 1950s photographers treated darkroom work as art, even building home darkrooms. Curator Charmaine Toh says printing skills mattered as much as taking the shot. Three Singapore lensmen, Wu Peng Seng, Yip Cheong Fun and Lee Sow Lim, feature in Tate Modern’s Light And Magic: The Birth Of Art Photography, which runs until Feb 21, 2027.
Wasp venom, crude oil: Britain’s Turner Prize finalists extract art from environment
MIDDLESBROUGH – Upon entering the galleries of 2026’s Turner Prize exhibition, visitors will be startled to hear the trumpeting of a dying elephant. In the next room, beeswax is sculpted around 150-year-old walnut wood to form structures resembling honeycombs or fungi. Hand-blown glass vessels are filled with raw honey, ancient yeast or wasp venom.
Gut feelings: Kimberley Chia Qin’s Hot Girls Have Stomach Issues is a visceral poetry debut
By Kimberley Chia Qin Poetry/Afterimage Press/Paperback/109 pages/$20.90 Hot girls always seem to be trending. They are having hot girl summers, going on hot girl walks, getting hot girl trademarks. Most recently in June, American content creator Allie Rose caused an online furore by attempting to trademark the phrase “hot girls read”. For some years now, the hot girls have been having stomach issues.
Catherine Cho centres women in her gripping gangster drama The Devoted
By Catherine Cho Fiction/4th Estate/Hardcover/368 pages/$34.54 By the first lines of The Devoted, you know how the novel will end. The narrator’s husband will be killed in three days. She will be the one behind his murder. Yet Catherine Cho keeps the twists coming in her deftly plotted debut novel, a Hong Kong-set gangster drama that centres not the gangsters but the women around them, whose lives are circumscribed by violence resulting from the men’s choices.
Multireference Modeling Reveals the Origins of L-Edge X-ray Absorption Features in Photoredox-Active Nickel Complexes
Introduction Click to copy section linkSection link copied! Nickel-based photoredox catalysts are powerful activation platforms for forging carbon–carbon and carbon–heteroatom bonds under mild conditions. (1,2) Widespread adoption of this approach has prompted further investigation of the fundamental electronic structure of both the ground and excited states responsible for reactivity.
Jared Poon's City of Others: Singapore urban fantasy
By Jared Poon Fantasy/Orbit/Paperback/368 pages/$33.25 Imagine if walking around an NTUC Fairprice supermarket in a certain pattern unlocked a door to a hidden pocket dimension.
Ming Wong's 'Saint Sebastian' at National Gallery
LONDON – Had commuters crossing London’s Trafalgar Square on a chilly morning last October looked up at the National Gallery’s grand facade, they might have seen Singaporean artist Ming Wong tied to a column, pierced by arrows. This scene, inspired by the Christian martyr Saint Sebastian, is part of Wong’s new film Dance Of The Sun On The Water | Saltatio Solis In Aqua. Created during his year-long residency at the Gallery, it is now on show till April 5. Visual artsArtistsExhibitions
Book review: Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials sequel The Rose Field is full of thorns
By Philip Pullman Fantasy/David Fickling Books/Hardcover/625 pages/$39.19 Readers of British author Philip Pullman have been left on tenterhooks for the last six years, as Lyra Silvertongue, the heroine of his beloved children’s fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials (1995 to 2000), stepped into a ruined city in a moonlit desert towards an uncertain fate. Book reviewAuthorsFiction
Book review: Going to hell for a PhD in R.F. Kuang’s dark academia fantasy Katabasis
By R.F. Kuang Fantasy/Harper Voyager/Paperback/560 pages/$35.92 Academia can be hell, as anyone who has slogged through the desert of a doctorate only to tumble into the fiery pit of the job market will tell you. American author R.F. Kuang takes this literally in her sixth novel, Katabasis, in which two graduate students go to hell to retrieve their thesis adviser’s soul. Kuang, who made her name with the fantasy trilogy The Poppy War (2018 to 2020), is one of publishing’s darlings.
Book review: Ocean Vuong’s The Emperor Of Gladness finds beauty in a forgotten American town
UPDATED May 31, 2025, 01:15 PM
Book review: Robert Macfarlane’s wondrous Is A River Alive? maps the lives and deaths of water
UPDATED May 03, 2025, 01:15 PM
Book review: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count tells the stories of four African women
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Dream Count presents four stories about different West African women who migrate to America.
Book review: Nobel Laureate Han Kang’s We Do Not Part bears witness to Jeju’s painful past
We Do Not Part is Han Kang’s first novel to come out in an English translation after her Nobel Prize win.
Malaysian author Tash Aw wants to reinvent historical epic with new quartet
FOR SUBSCRIBERS Malaysian author Tash Aw is behind The South, the first of four novels that will follow a Malaysian family through the decades, beginning in 1997 during the Asian Financial Crisis.PHOTOS: TARA SOSROWARDOYO, FOURTH ESTATE LONDON – Tash Aw wants to reinvent the historical epic. It had always been the Malaysian author’s ambition to write a “big family epic” in the vein of Rohinton Mistry and Vikram Seth, India-born writers he had admired growing up.
Use of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence in Surgical Instrument Recognition
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Book review: Jane Pek’s dating app mystery The Rivals puts a spy in the house of love
“I’m so sick of online love,” sings American pop star Chappell Roan. As if online dating were not already laden with enough pitfalls, soon you might be questioning not only if someone is lying on his or her profile, but also if you are talking to a real person at all.
Book review: The City And Its Uncertain Walls a shadow of Haruki Murakami’s older, better works
All done! This article is now fully available for you Book review: The City And Its Uncertain Walls a shadow of Haruki Murakami’s older, better works
Impact of Physician Specialty on Treatment Costs of Invasive Melanoma
All articles published by MDPI are made immediately available worldwide under an open access license. No special permission is required to reuse all or part of the article published by MDPI, including figures and tables. For articles published under an open access Creative Common CC BY license, any part of the article may be reused without permission provided that the original article is clearly cited. For more information, please refer to https://www.mdpi.com/openaccess.
Book review: How do you love a city? Nghi Vo’s The City In Glass counts the ways
In a lecture, Italian writer Italo Calvino called his 1972 book Invisible Cities “something like a last love poem addressed to the city”, “a dream born out of the heart of the unlivable cities we know”.
Book review: Sinister spycraft, weird horror as Jeff VanderMeer returns to Area X in Absolution
Weird fiction writer Jeff VanderMeer blends espionage intrigue with horror in Absolution. PHOTOS: FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX, DITTE VALENTE Updated Oct 19, 2024, 11:00 AM Published Oct 19, 2024, 11:00 AM By Jeff VanderMeer Science-fiction/Farrar, Straus & Giroux/Paperback/528 pages/$24.98 In a remote ruin called Dead Town, in a place called the Forgotten Coast, in an unnamed backwater of the US, a group of biologists set up camp to study the landscape. Already a subscriber?
Identification of Pain through Actigraphy-Recorded Patient Movement: A Comprehensive Review
All articles published by MDPI are made immediately available worldwide under an open access license. No special permission is required to reuse all or part of the article published by MDPI, including figures and tables. For articles published under an open access Creative Common CC BY license, any part of the article may be reused without permission provided that the original article is clearly cited. For more information, please refer to https://www.mdpi.com/openaccess.
Travel-Related Cutaneous Myiasis: A Case Report
All articles published by MDPI are made immediately available worldwide under an open access license. No special permission is required to reuse all or part of the article published by MDPI, including figures and tables. For articles published under an open access Creative Common CC BY license, any part of the article may be reused without permission provided that the original article is clearly cited. For more information, please refer to https://www.mdpi.com/openaccess.
Book review: Zen Cho’s romcom The Friend Zone Experiment delves into family drama
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Book review: Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s posthumous Until August an imperfect pleasure
Until August By Gabriel Garcia Marquez, translated by Anne McLean Fiction/Viking/Hardcover/129 pages/$22.40/Amazon SG (amzn.to/3w2Th1g) 4 stars Posthumous publication is always thorny, especially when the author in question wanted his or her unfinished manuscripts destroyed upon his or her death. After British fantasy writer Terry Pratchett’s death in 2015, the hard drive containing his drafts was crushed by a steamroller, as per his request.
Book review: Yeoh Jo-Ann mixes cats and coffee in a quixotic but aimless novel
Deplorable Conversations With Cats And Other Distractions By Yeoh Jo-Ann Fiction/Penguin Random House South-east Asia/Paperback/383 pages/$29.32/Amazon SG (amzn.to/3UjnwKN) 3 stars It is a truth universally acknowledged that a book with “cat” in the title must be catnip for the bestseller charts.
Book review: In The Invisible Hotel, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave
The Invisible Hotel By Yeji Y. Ham Fiction/Atlantic/Hardcover/307 pages/$36.91/Amazon SG (amzn.to/3TBC08A) 4 stars Yewon’s family has bones in the bathtub. Phalanxes, scapulas, collarbones. As long as Yewon can remember, she has had to help her mother wash these anonymous, blackened bones, which belonged to their ancestors. This is not unique to her family. In the South Korean village of Dalbit, every family has a bathtub of bones.
Book review: Choo Yangsze charms with fantastical tale of fox spirits
Malaysian writer Choo Yangsze is the author of The Fox Wife. PHOTOS: QUERCUS, JAMES CHAM Updated 38 sec ago Published 1 min ago The Fox Wife By Yangsze Choo Fiction/Quercus/Hardcover/390 pages/$32.36/Amazon SG (amzn.to/42lZ7qe) Four stars There are humans and there are things, wrote 18th-century Chinese scholar Ji Yun, and then there are foxes.
Book review: Jesmyn Ward’s harrowing Let Us Descend enters the hell of American slavery
Let Us Descend By Jesmyn Ward Fiction/Bloomsbury/Hardcover/303 pages/$38.41/Amazon SG (amzn.to/3U2wrjX) 4 stars In his pioneering 1845 memoir, the former slave Frederick Douglass recalls a horrific childhood memory of watching his aunt get whipped by their master. “It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass,” he writes.
Book review: Gory, gender-bending game of thrones in Shelley Parker-Chan’s imperial China fantasy
He Who Drowned The World By Shelley Parker-Chan Historical fantasy/Mantle/Paperback/487 pages/$32/Amazon SG (amzn.to/3uK3vm7) 4 stars How does a lowly monk become emperor of China? It sounds improbable, yet this is the extraordinary true story of Zhu Yuanzhang, whose journey from nobody to the founder of the Ming Dynasty in the 14th century is one of the most astronomical ascents in history. To this already incredible tale, add one more ingredient: What if Zhu were, in fact, born a girl?
10 must-visit indie London bookstores
8 min read Published On November 29, 2023 London has always been a city of literary riches and its array of independent bookshops makes it even more of a draw for the bibliophile. Here are ten places where you can stock up on your winter reads while experiencing a slice of history, a taste of royalty or a touch of whimsy. 1. Daunt Books Daunt Books is a destination bookstore in more than one sense.
Book review: Hiron Ennes creates parasitic body horror in debut novel Leech
Leech By Hiron Ennes Science fiction/Tor/Paperback/323 pages/$27.42/Amazon SG (amzn.to/46HJ5Z5) 4 out of 5 In the remote Chateau de Verdira, up in the wintry north, the only doctor in the area has mysteriously died. An autopsy by the Interprovincial Medical Institute discovers, clinging to the corpse’s left eye, a black, hair-like substance with a life of its own – a parasite. This is troubling for the Institute, because the doctor’s body was already hosting a parasite: them.
Book review: Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s horror novel Silver Nitrate casts a dark spell
Silver Nitrate By Silvia Moreno-Garcia Fiction/Jo Fletcher/Hardcover/336 pages/$29.69/Amazon SG (amzn.to/3PEEzn7) 3 stars Decades after it was phased out in the 1950s, cinema buffs still wax lyrical about silver nitrate film stock. Whites “like bleached linen”, blacks “so rich you feel you could bury your hands in that velvet darkness”, raves a character in the novel Silver Nitrate. Its beauty was unparalleled – and so was its danger. Nitrate stock was incredibly flammable.
Book review: Shy by Max Porter is a dark, poetic look into a troubled teenage mind
British bookseller and editor Max Porter's fourth book, Shy, sees him melding prose and poetry effortlessly.
Book review: Colson Whitehead steals the show in slick crime novel Crook Manifesto
Crook Manifesto By Colson Whitehead Fiction/Fleet/Paperback/321 pages/$23/Amazon SG (amzn.to/3P54gwT) 4 out of 5 Parents who went to unthinkable lengths to secure American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift’s Eras concert tickets for their offspring will sympathise with Ray Carney. It is 1971, the start of the disco decade in dizzying, decaying New York City, and Carney is retired from his double life as a fence for stolen goods.
Novelist Rachel Heng on finding a place in Singapore’s changing landscape
8 min read Published On September 4, 2023 In March this year, Singapore-born Rachel Heng published her sophomore novel, The Great Reclamation, which has been named one of the best books of the year so far by The New Yorker and Town and Country Magazine. The Great Reclamation traces the construction of Singapore as a nation through the eyes of a boy from a fishing village, whose life is intertwined with a series of islands that mysteriously appear in the sea.
Book review: In The Moon Represents My Heart, a Chinese family travels through time
The Moon Represents My Heart By Pim Wangtechawat Fiction/Magpie/Paperback/367 pages/$37.62 from Amazon SG (amzn.to/47SSmyK) 3 stars For a Chinese person, there are few songs more iconic than The Moon Represents My Heart, made famous in 1977 by Taiwanese songstress Teresa Teng.
Book review: Pink Slime by Fernanda Trias is set in a post-apocalyptic port city of poison
Pink Slime By Fernanda Trias, translated by Heather Cleary Science fiction/Scribe/Paperback/224 pages/$27.21/Amazon (amzn.to/45fbViB) 4 out of 5 In a port city where toxic algae in the water results in a deadly red wind that infects anyone it touches, an unnamed woman waits for an ambiguous end. Uruguayan author Fernanda Trias’ dystopian novel won a slew of Latin-American literary awards and has now been translated from Spanish into English by Heather Cleary.
Exploring the Potential of Aptamers in Targeting Neuroinflammation and Neurodegenerative Disorders: Opportunities and Challenges
Abstract : Neuroinflammation is the precursor for several neurodegenerative diseases (NDDs), such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Parkinson’s disease (PD), and multiple sclerosis (MS). Targeting neuroinflammation has emerged as a promising strategy to address a wide range of CNS pathologies. These NDDs still present significant challenges in terms of limited and ineffective diagnosis and treatment options, driving the need to explore innovative and novel therapeutic alternatives.
7 bookstores, libraries and literary landmarks in Paris for bibliophiles to bookmark
5 min read Published On June 23, 2023 Few cities have captured the literary imagination as Paris has. Ernest Hemingway called it “a moveable feast”. Visiting bookworms will find in its magnificent libraries and myriad bookstores not just new reads, but marvellous architecture and windows into the past of the city. Most will flock to the popular bookstore Shakespeare & Co on the Left Bank, but here are seven other spots for literary lovers to linger in. 1.
Book review: Sebastian Barry’s Old God’s Time plumbs a policeman’s painful past
Old God’s Time By Sebastian Barry Fiction/Faber & Faber/Paperback/261 pages/$32.40/Books Kinokuniya 4 out of 5 Tom Kettle, a retired policeman, lives alone on the Irish coast. When two younger cops come knocking about a cold case, he is forced to revisit a past he has either lost due to his deterioriating memory or deliberately buried. Sebastian Barry’s 11th novel is a seaworn pebble of a story that cracks open to reveal a dark, howling chasm of grief.
Book review: Rachel Heng’s The Great Reclamation is a sweeping historical epic about Singapore’s nation-building Original
The Great Reclamation By Rachel Heng Fiction/Riverhead/Paperback/451 pages/$28.03/Major bookstores 5 out of 5 Rachel Heng’s The Great Reclamation is many things. It is an epic of nation-building. It is a historical fantasy. It might be the next great Singapore novel. It is almost certainly the most gripping tale of land reclamation you will read. This is Heng’s follow-up to her 2018 debut Suicide Club, a more straightforward science-fiction thriller about longevity and mortality.
Book review: Han Kang’s hypnotic Greek Lessons probes the limits of language
By Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won Fiction/Hamish Hamilton/Hardcover/148 pages/$32.26/Books Kinokuniya 4 out of 5 A woman, overwhelmed by language, finds herself unable to speak. Her only solace is in learning ancient Greek, a dead language which in its complexity and unfamiliarity may help her break her silence. Already a subscriber?
Book review: Maids solve murder mystery in Balli Kaur Jaswal’s Now You See Us
Now You See Us By Balli Kaur Jaswal Fiction/HarperCollins/Paperback/325 pages/$30.24/Books Kinokuniya 4 stars When a Filipina domestic worker is arrested for her employer’s murder, all Singapore seems to think she is guilty – except for a trio of unlikely sleuths, who set out to find the real culprit and exonerate their countrywoman. Singaporean author Balli Kaur Jaswal made it big with her juicy London-set novel Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows (2017).
Book review: Booker Prize winner Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood is a scathing eco-thriller
By Eleanor Catton Fiction/Granta/Paperback/424 pages/$29.95/Books Kinokuniya 4 stars In William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, the thane of the title is told in a prophecy that he will not be vanquished until “Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill/Shall come against him”. Already a subscriber?
Book review: Pulp friction in Shubigi Rao’s look at banished books, alternative libraries
Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory Of The Banished Book By Shubigi Rao Non-fiction/Rock Paper Fire/Softcover/400 pages/$50 before GST at Books Kinokuniya in March/Free as e-copy from pulp-iii.com 4 out of 5 It is easy to lionise books and libraries. But what if a book is dangerous? In the Venetian antiquarian bookstore Segni nel Tempo, bookseller Federico Bucci tells Singaporean artist and writer Shubigi Rao about some of the most dangerous books ever printed.
Book review: Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share Of Night is a magnificent epic of Argentine horror
By Mariana Enriquez, translated by Megan McDowell Fiction/Granta/Paperback/736 pages/$32.95/Books Kinokuniya 5 out of 5 A man tells his son to put his hand into a box. Already a subscriber? Log in ST One Digital $9.90 $9.90/month No contract ST app access on 1 mobile device Unlock these benefits All subscriber-only content on ST app and straitstimes.com Easy access any time via ST app on 1 mobile device E-paper with 2-week archive so you won't miss out on content that matters to you
Book review: A loving footnote to late Discworld author Terry Pratchett’s quirky life
Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes By Rob Wilkins Biography/Doubleday/Paperback/439 pages/$33.71/Books Kinokuniya 4 out of 5 stars A man “is not dead while his name is still spoken”. So goes a line in Going Postal (2004), the 33rd book in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. This is the hope embedded in this biography – a loving, wry portrait of the late British author. Already a subscriber?
Book review: Comic legend Alan Moore’s wild, wacky short stories in Illuminations
Illuminations By Alan Moore Fiction/Bloomsbury/Paperback/453 pages/$32.95/Books Kinokuniya 3 out of 5 stars Already a subscriber? Log in ST One Digital $9.90 $9.90/month No contract ST app access on 1 mobile device Unlock these benefits All subscriber-only content on ST app and straitstimes.com Easy access any time via ST app on 1 mobile device E-paper with 2-week archive so you won't miss out on content that matters to you
Book review: Maths and madness in Cormac McCarthy’s first novels in 16 years
The Passenger By Cormac McCarthy Picador/Paperback/385 pages/$32.85/Books Kinokuniya (str.sg/wCTg) Stella Maris By Cormac McCarthy Picador/Paperback/195 pages/$28.43/Books Kinokuniya (str.sg/wCTM) 4 stars “Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” wrote T.S. Eliot in the poem Four Quartets. In his poetry, Eliot sought a language with which to bear up to that unbearable reality, and so too does Cormac McCarthy in his first new books in 16 years.
Book review: Neon Yang’s The Genesis Of Misery is Joan of Arc in space
The Genesis Of Misery By Neon YangFiction/Tor/Hardcover/419 pages/$47.95/Books Kinokuniya 4 out of 5 Already a subscriber? Log in ST One Digital $9.90 $9.90/month No contract ST app access on 1 mobile device Unlock these benefits All subscriber-only content on ST app and straitstimes.com Easy access any time via ST app on 1 mobile device E-paper with 2-week archive so you won't miss out on content that matters to you
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