Winners of 6th Singapore Poetry Contest

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here.

Every year, in the run-up to Singapore's National Day on August 9, we announce the results of our annual Singapore Poetry Contest. Open to everyone who is NOT a Singaporean citizen, the annual contest seeks poems that use the word “Singapore” or its variants in a creative and significant way. It is our way of building imaginative connections of all kinds—integral, tangential, plural—between Singapore and the rest of the world. This year, the connections were greatly multiplied.

We received a total of 432 poems, 337 more poems than last year, so you can imagine that this year’s contest was much more competitive, with many strong entries. The poems came from 32 countries around the world, 11 more than last year. Nigeria leads with 159 entries, followed by the USA 74, India 29, the Philippines 28, the UK 23, Singapore 13, Zimbabwe 11, South Africa 9, Canada 8, Malaysia 7, Australia 5, Ireland 5, Pakistan 5, Cameroon 4, France 3, Malawi 3, Zambia 3, Bolivia 2, Ghana 2, Israel 2, Nepal 2, Thailand 2, Austria 1, Burkina Faso 1, Germany 1, Hong Kong 1, Kenya 1, Mexico 1, the Netherlands 1, Spain 1, Sri Lanka 1, and Switzerland 1.

First prize (USD100) goes to “City, Time Zone (GMT+8)” by Anannya Uberoi.

Second prize (USD50) goes to “Panthera leo: a short history” by Maggie Wang.

Third prize (USD20) goes to “Dithyramb to Wetness” by Iloh Onyekachi.

Congratulations to the winners! Enjoy their poems, and the judge's comments, here. The Singapore Poetry Contest will return in May 2021.

We are so proud to share with you that the first-prize winner of last year's contest, Mia Ayumi Malhotra's stunning poem "At the Empress: An Epithalamium" has won the 2020 Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian poetry, worth SGD1,500. Congratulations, Mia! Read Mia's poem and the other winning poems here, and an interview with Mia and me here.

And to top off our celebration of National Day, we're giving away 50 free access codes to watch online Wild Rice's production of Merdeka / 獨立 /சுதந்திரம் to young people from the ages of 17 to 25! This tremendously informative and rousing production lays bare Singapore's colonial history and its aftermath. I was close to tears at the end of it. Co-written by one of our honorary advisors Alfian Sa'at, this is theater of the best kind. See details below.

Jee Leong Koh
August 6, 2020

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