Writers’ Centre Literary Awards 2024

The Writers’ Centre Literary Awards is an annual competition open to all NUS students that seeks to recognize and promote excellence in creative writing. Students may submit work in five categories: Fiction, Creative Non-fiction, Poetry, Playwriting/Screenwriting, and Comics. Judges are selected from established authors in the Singaporean writing community and beyond. The panel of judges for the inaugural edition comprised Yeoh Jo-Ann, Jenny Odell, Victoria Chang, Johnny Jon Jon, and Andrew Tan.

The Awards was first initiated as the Yale-NUS Literary Awards from 2016 to 2023. In 2024, the awards expanded to encompass the greater NUS student community. For an overview of the previous award winners and judges, head over here.

Meet Our Finalists & Judges for Each Category

FICTION

First: Cat's Cradle by Taylor A.H. Lee
Second: The Water Body by RMC
Third: The Recipe by Mahadevan Svetha

Judge: Yeoh Jo-Ann
Yeoh Jo-Ann grew up in Malaysia and lives in Singapore. She grew up wanting to be a cat or a rock star, but instead spent most of her adult life working in publishing and digital marketing. Her first novel, Impractical Uses of Cake, won the Epigram Books Fiction Prize in Singapore in 2018 and has been translated into German. Her short stories have been included in Singaporean anthologies such as Best Singaporean Short Stories: Volume Three, and in 2020, her short story Dog Tiger Horse won the Boston Review’s annual Aura Estrada Short Story Contest. Jo-Ann’s second novel, Deplorable Conversations with Cats and Other Distractions, was published in March 2024, and she is now working on her third novel. She hopes to complete it before she turns into some sort of cabbage.

CREATIVE NON-FICTION

First: Chili Padi Girl in a Chili Padi World by Max Pasakorn
Second: Bait, Discarded by Angels by Jack Xi
Third: All I Had to Do by Wee Yi Li Grace

Judge: Jenny Odell
Jenny Odell is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in California. She is the author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy and Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review. Odell has been an artist in residence at Recology SF (otherwise known as the dump), the San Francisco Planning Department, and the Internet Archive. From 2013 to 2021, she taught digital art at Stanford University.

POETRY

First: patient history by Tricia Tan Hui Ling
Second: Ass Poetica by Max Pasakorn
Third: Mass Extinction Afterparty by Jack Xi

Judge: Victoria Chang
Victoria Chang’s forthcoming book of poems, With My Back to the World, will be published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and Corsair Books in the U.K. Her most recent book of poetry, The Trees Witness Everything was published by Copper Canyon Press and Corsair Books in the U.K. in 2022, and was named one of the Best Books of 2022 by the New Yorker and The Guardian.

Her non-fiction book, Dear Memory (Milkweed Editions), was published in 2021 and was named a favorite non-fiction book of 2021 by Electric Literature and Kirkus. OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), her book of poems, was named a New York Times Notable Book, a Time Must-Read Book, and received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. It was also longlisted for a National Book Award and named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Griffin International Poetry Prize. She has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chowdhury Prize in Literature. She serves as the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and as the Director of Poetry@Tech.

PLAYWRITING/SCREENWRITING

First: MOTH BALLS! by Charleston Chan Shiqi
Second: Father Cane by Voon
Third: Clown Behaviour. by Shrinidhi Omprakash

Judge: Johnny Jon Jon
Since his debut full-length play in 2006, Johnny Jon Jon has transitioned from dissecting socio-political themes to delving into the depths of the human experience within the realm of minor literature. Notable works such as “Hawa” (2015) and “Potong” (2018) have earned critical acclaim alongside pieces like “National Memory Project” (2012), “Family Dinner” (2017), and “Punggah” (2020). In 2022, “Hawa” and “Potong” were consolidated into the anthology “Potong: To Care/Cut” as part of Ethos Books’ Orbit series.

Jon Jon is currently working on “Kentot”. When not writing plays, Jon Jon writes short stories and facilitates design thinking workshops. He currently lives with his better half as they try to get their startups (children) to become unicorns.

COMICS

First: To Kill A Bear by Audrey Odang
Runner Up: Play-doh: A Transmasc's Guide to Completing Rainbow Road by Clay

Judge: Andrew Tan
Andrew Tan (aka Drewscape) is a freelance illustrator and an Eisner-nominated comic artist based in Singapore. He also enjoys teaching illustration and urban sketching. His illustrations can be found in the Sherlock Sam book series as well as in picture books, and comics for various clients. He is the author of two graphic novels: Monsters Miracles and Mayonnaise and The Ollie Comics: Diary of a first-time dad.