Tom Plate may be one of the few writers able to brag that he once received a note from Lee Kuan Yew saying 'you deserve to be read'. Singapore's senior statesman sent the fax after reading a column Plate had written on China. That might explain why the veteran journalist, who has been writing a weekly syndicated column on America's relationship with Asia since 1996, found it relatively easy to get access to the Minister Mentor for his latest book, Conversations with Lee Kuan Yew.
'I faxed him a letter; I'd asked for two sessions. I told him the usual ground rules, you can see the direct quotes but not the manuscript. The response time was no more than two weeks, and then it was really a question of timing,' the 66-year-old author and columnist says.
Conversations with Lee Kuan Yew: Citizen of Singapore: How to Build a Nation is the first in a new series, Giants of Asia, published by Marshall Cavendish.
It will include two more books by Plate, one on former Malaysian prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad, the other about Ban Ki-moon, the current UN Secretary General. 'These three are statement books for my career. I've been doing Asia in 800- to 900-word takes, and I wanted to nail down certain large personalities and themes in a longer format,' Plate says.
'I hope that people can pick up this first book in 50 years and get a feel for what he was like. I didn't want a biography; that's already been done, but I wanted you to feel like you're in the room with him.'
Plate chose a film script format, presenting a full dialogue between Lee and himself along with a narrator's commentary. 'I read dozens of screenplays to develop some technique; from how you set a dialogue to how you show body movement, so that the reader is the camera, as on a set,' he explains.