Solihin's academic interest in the literary output of the Malay World builds on his training from the B.A. (Hons) in Literature that he received at Yale-NUS College. His thesis on the maverick Malaysian poet Salleh Ben Joned read Poems Sacred and Profane / Sajak-sajak Saleh as a deconstruction of nationalised Malayness across linguistic, religious, and ethnic lines.
Solihin believes that it is by identifying precise points of contention that hegemonic understandings of the different configurations of what is “Malay,” “Islam,” and “literature” can then be problematised and pluralised. Additionally, he is invested in the figure of the multilingual writer who on account of their linguistic liminality, provokes discussions parallel to translation studies, post-coloniality, and conceptions of world literature. Multilingual writers are far from oddities in cosmopolitan Southeast Asia but he is excited by the motivations behind their choice of language(s) and textual trajectories in a globalised Malay world.