The series is also credited with contributing prominently to creative writing and the creation of a shared regional identity amongst English-language writers of Southeast Asia.
Comber thought a similar series focussing initially on Southeast Asia was worth pursuing to "give a tremendous boost to creative writing in English...which was still regarded then as something of a cultural desert".
The series also met with critical acclaim when Shirley Geok-lin Lim's debut collection Crossing The Peninsula & Other Stories (1980) won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, a first both for an Asian and for a woman.
In 1982, however, Charles Cher, the then General Manager of Heinemann Educational Books, confirmed that the series had stopped publishing poetry because of poor sales.
Some Writing in Asia series titles have since been republished by other companies, like Lloyd Fernando's novel Scorpion Orchid (1976) by Epigram Books in 2014.