TWO LIVES IN ONE

The worlds of investment management and poetry could scarcely be further apart, yet Madeleine Lee is a towering figure in both. “It’s about paying attention to whichever side of the brain is talking to you,” she says.

Raffles Hotel is probably Singapore’s most famous landmark, a legacy of empire once frequented by royalty, screen stars and socialites, each drawn to this sophisticated gateway to the east.

Writers too – Ernest Hemingway and Noel Coward stayed here, Joseph Conrad referenced the hotel in his work, Rudyard Kipling edited Jungle Book on the veranda. And just as Somerset Maugham worked into fiction conversations he overheard here, so Madeleine Lee (Economics 1984) finds its atmosphere and people fertile ground for her poetry.

As the hotel’s writer in residence, Madeleine was inspired simply by observing life unfolding in front of her. “I would go for long weekends and sit in the famous Long Bar or hang out in the lobby with a cup of tea and watch everything going on.”

The fruits of her labour, the poetry collection How to Build a Lux Hotel was published in 2023. It was Madeleine’s 12th book: a remarkable milestone for a writer who freely admits that until 20 years ago, she thought no-one would be interested in her work.

Though she’d been writing poetry since childhood, Madeleine’s career took a very different path, after her decision to come to Leeds in the early eighties. “Basically I was ‘running away from home’. I was briefly at the National University of Singapore but wanted to experience living abroad. Perhaps I even wanted to be out of my comfort zone and suffer a little bit.”

Leeds gave Madeleine her first experience of financial management. “My mum said: ‘Here’s a cheque and it needs to last you the full three years. If you run out of money don’t come back to us for more’. In those days you could get 15% interest in a deposit account – and I made it last. I only went home once a year and by the end of my second year I still had enough money to buy a car.”

Even so, she regrets not making the most of her time in Leeds. “It was so comfortable. I had full board and lodging in Charles Morris Hall but I wish I had got out of the city a bit more.”

After graduation, Madeleine returned home to build a successful career in finance and investment and as a serial entrepreneur, while privately pursuing her passion for writing. It might have stayed that way, but for the fateful intervention of novelist Suchen Christine Lim.

“I’d gone to a reading circle to show my work, and Suchen said I should think about being published. Up to that point, I didn’t think anyone would want to read it. She said that if you don’t put it out there you will never know what people think.”

Together they found a publisher, and her first collection, A Single Headlamp, was published in 2003 – and since then Madeleine has had a new book published roughly every two years. “I try to write 50 poems a year. If I get to the end of June and find I haven’t written at least 24 then my work-life balance must be wrong.”

Her two disparate worlds eventually collided in her 2017 work, Square Root of Time. “I got bored during a refresher course on risk management, and ended up writing poems around the lecture notes, using concepts like averages and standard deviation. I didn’t set out to write about this, but it became a discourse about abusive relationships – including the one I was in at the time. I almost never write about myself, but managed to produce a very personal work. It was really cathartic.”

Madeleine’s work is more typically based on the world around her. Never more so than during her stint as writer in residence at Singapore’s Botanical Gardens, a colonial legacy transformed into a world-class science and conservation institution.

“I had two thirds of a book written on nature themes and they invited me to come and complete the work. I use things in nature to trigger a stream of consciousness, and ponder questions like why are humans so complicated, and why can't we behave more like trees and nature?”

The residency was part of the gardens’ bid for UNESCO World Heritage Status an accolade they achieved in 2015.

Fast forward seven years, and Madeleine found herself in a similar role at Raffles, the first poet and first Singaporean in the role. “I would interview staff, talk to guests and observe the hotel’s changing seasons.”

Sometimes she’d sit in the Writers Bar, named to honour the great authors who have passed through its doors. “It’s decorated like an old library or members’ club with bound copies of Punch magazine, and rows of old encyclopedias.” The alphabetical name of one of these, ‘Trance to Venial Sin’, proved the idiosyncratic inspiration for one of the works in her new volume. As if repaying the compliment, the famous bar’s gleaming brass counter now serves five cocktails each based on one of Madeleine’s poems.

Poetry has rebooted Madeleine’s relationship with Leeds, following a chance conversation with Singaporean writer Shirley Chew: “I didn’t know about her connection to Leeds. She had been Head of English when I was there.”

Now Emeritus Professor of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures, Shirley introduced Madeleine to Professor of Romantic Literature John Whale and to Simon Armitage, now Poet Laureate and Professor of Poetry. The University is home to a vast archive of Simon’s material, documenting his work from his earliest unpublished poems to more recent poetry collections. Madeleine’s generosity funded the digitization of material relating to Walking Home, Armitage’s account of walking the Pennine Way.

And she continues to steer a course between her writing, her support of philanthropic causes and her widespread business interests. “My work and poetry are quite separate. I love writing, but I also love maths and numbers. I think this balance keeps me sane.”