Catherine Lim is almost as famous for her candour as she is for best-selling novels. But not even the mischievous irony with which she writes of her Chinese heritage in her new novel, The Song Of Silver Frond (Orion), reveals the extent of Lim's fun-loving nature.
'Tell me,' Singapore's first lady of literature asks, 'did you fall for the ending?' Lim then breaks into peals of laughter when she discovers another victim of her storytelling prowess.
Even her British publishers, she says, were convinced that this tale of a poor but beautiful village girl who captures the heart of a rich old businessman was the story of her own grandmother. 'You see how wicked I am?' says Lim. 'I am a born confidence trickster.'
Lim, it has to be said, is a born storyteller. At 62, she remains a self-confessed 'compulsive writer' whose fascination with the southern Chinese culture of her ancestors, particularly the oral traditions of storytelling, has given rise to 17-plus books, including more than six best-selling novels, and several short story and poetry collections.
'I am passionate about my Chinese culture,' says Lim, who grew up in the early 1940s as the eighth daughter of a Taoist Hokkien family in Malaysia's Kedah state, before moving to Singapore four decades ago.
'But it is also a culture which, from my present-day position as a woman in modern-day Singapore, I find both intriguing and disturbing.'