Winners of 2022 SU Undergrad Essay Awards

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Singapore Unbound is pleased to announce three awards for the best undergraduate critical essays on Singapore and other literatures this year. Each winner receives USD250 and publication in our journal SUSPECT. The awards are generously funded by Professor Koh Tai Ann (Nanyang Technological University)

We're grateful to literary scholar Weihsin Gui (University of California, Riverside) for reading the submissions and making the selection. He gives his comments below, first on all the submissions and then on the individual winners. 

“The essays submitted for this award are all to be commended for the depth of their textual analyses and the breadth of their engagement with various cultural and literary theories. I can envision all eight essays, after undergoing peer review and varying degrees of revision and expansion, being published in academic journals. I encourage the authors to consider doing so as they would be making important contributions to the academic study of literature from and about Singapore. Ultimately, my judgement was motivated by Singapore Unbound’s guiding spirit of innovation and inspiration regarding Singapore literature. I chose essays that I considered most innovative in their articulation of literary or visual texts with existing theoretical ideas or concepts, or that inspire fresh insights by discussing a group of authors and texts together in surprising and exciting ways.”

In alphabetical order, the 2022 winning essays are:

"Being (in the) Present: Analysing the Productive Nostalgia for Pearl Bank Apartments in Tiong Bahru Social Club and Online Responses," by Timothy Wan Zhu-An, National University of Singapore

Gui: “This essay challenges accepted notions of nostalgia by showing how a film, using comedy and satire, can give nostalgia a critical and productive aspect. While nostalgia in Singapore regarding the fast-changing urban landscape is often expressed in a sentimental and elegiac key, the essay author has capably drawn on existing scholarship on nostalgia and expanded upon it for the Singaporean context through a thorough analysis of Tan Bee Thiam’s Tiong Bahru Social Club (2020). This is, I believe, the first extensive analysis of Tan’s film, and I hope it will be a groundbreaking piece that brings more attention to the film.”

"Re-Writing Myths in Singapore Literature & Culture," by Quek Yee Kiat, Nanyang Technological University

Gui: “This essay connects four literary texts by women writers from Singapore and shows how they collectively critique dominant cultural and national myths related to race, gender, and sexuality. What is remarkable here is the author’s coverage of both poetry (in the first section about “Fearless Females”) and prose (in the second section on “Queering Hybrids”); in fact, the two short stories discussed in the second section could arguably be read as speculative fiction as well. That the essay discusses texts by authors who have not received substantial scholarly attention is also another plus.”

"Victorian Botanical Fiction Uprooted: Orchids as Weapons of Anticolonial Resistance in Ng Yi-Sheng’s ‘Agnes Joaquim, Bioterrorist’," by Katherine Enright, Harvard University

Gui: “The author situates Ng’s short story about Agnes Joaquim and orchids within a larger context and tradition of botanical horror fiction that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For the uninitiated reader, the author provides a handy overview of scholarship about botanical horror fiction and colonialism’s connection to botany and horticultural studies. But, through detailed close readings, the author never loses sight of how Ng’s story offers a critical and speculative rethinking of a flower and a woman that have been enshrined as Singapore’s national icons.”

Congratulations to all three winners! Look out for their essays in SUSPECT in November.

We want to thank all who submitted their essays to this year's awards. Their interesting topics—ranging from the study of postcolonial poetics in Hamid Roslan's 
parsetreeforestfire to an examination of the figure of the caregiver in Gladys Ng's film Under the Same Pink Sky, from looking at the expressive formalism of Sonny Liew's graphic novel The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye to analyzing the depiction of landscape in the writings of Alfian Sa'at and Arthur Yap—speak to the vitality of Singapore literature and its study. The awards will return next year.

Jee Leong Koh
September 8, 2022

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