Message from the Chairperson

Welcome to the 12th edition of the Asian Festival of Children’s Content!

The world has changed in both significant and minuscule ways as we are still adapting to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The theme of this year’s festival “Reimagine. Rebuild. Reignite” embodies the yearning and desire many of us have for a post-COVID world – where we would attain a sense of stability and normalcy, and recalibrate the various ways of living and working that have been upended. At AFCC this year, we invite you to join us to collectively reignite our imagination and share the rich diversity of our stories, so that we can shape the future of storytelling together.

The success of 2020’s AFCC, where we held our first online festival, have stood us in good stead for the existing challenges of the pandemic. This year’s AFCC will continue to be an online festival. This will enable our audiences and speakers from different corners of the world to foster new friendships and explore collaborations across borders.

This year we celebrate Thailand as our Country of Focus (COF). We are honoured to collaborate with the Publishers and Booksellers Association of Thailand (PUBAT) on co-organising the COF programmes. We would like to thank PUBAT for the dedication, energy and experience that they bring to this partnership, which is invaluable in forging the ASEAN spirit. We are particularly excited about the co-translation project, in which we will be translating selected children’s book titles from each country. Through this project, we hope that children and parents from both countries will be exposed to the stories and characters in the books, thus gaining deeper cross-cultural understanding of our respective histories and cultures.

On behalf of the Book Council, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to all our Programme Committee members, donors and supporters for your unwavering support over the years. Your generous contributions have definitely gone a long way in allowing AFCC to expand and grow in so many ways.

May you all have a most enriching and meaningful experience at AFCC 2021!

Claire Chiang

Chairperson Singapore Book Council