Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

As a fiction writer, my creative practice is closely tied to the material and complex systems of a particular place and time. I take a research-driven and multidisciplinary approach to my writing, frequently collaborating with specialists in other fields, including scientists, historians, or visual artists. Some of my recent collaborations include working with National Resource Defense Council experts to write new fiction in response to the UN’s 2040 Climate Report and exhibiting my writing at Singapore’s ArtScience Museum multimedia exhibition 2219: Futures Imagined, a series of immersive installations, meditative spaces, films, paintings, and sculptures imagining Singapore’s future 200 years from now.

While at Headlands

While at Headlands, I hope to work on the first draft of a new novel set in 19th century colonial Singapore about botany and ambition. 

Selected Work

Rachel Heng, The Great Reclamation, Riverhead Books, March 2023.

Rachel Heng, “Before The Valley”, The New Yorker, June 2021.

Rachel Heng, “Sand”, Guernica, December 2021.

Rachel Heng, “Gah Men”, Guernica, November 2019.

Rachel Heng, “You Know I Want It Ice Cold”, Kenyon Review, May/June 2019 issue.