SINGAPORE - The Epigram Books Fiction Prize was won by a Malaysian for the second time on Saturday (Jan 22).
Karina Robles Bahrin will receive $25,000 from the seventh edition of the prize, Singapore's only award for unpublished English-language novels.
Her manuscript, The Accidental Malay, came in tops at a virtual ceremony live-streamed on Facebook and YouTube.
"This is really unexpected because it’s my first attempt at a novel," said Robles Bahrin, 52, who runs La Pari-Pari, a small hotel and restaurant, with her sister on the island of Langkawi.
The idea for her novel had been marinating in her head for 10 years, but she only began writing it in March 2020, when Malaysia’s pandemic lockdown decimated business at the hotel.
"We started having to eat through the stock in our restaurant before it all went bad," she recalls over Zoom. "But then I realised it did give me time and space to do something else that I'd always wanted, which was to write the book."
She is the second Malaysian to win the prize, after Joshua Kam in 2020 for his novel How The Man In Green Saved Pahang, And Possibly The World.
The Accidental Malay follows Jasmine Leong, a workaholic who wants to be the next chief executive of a bak kwa company owned by the wealthy Leong clan. The discovery that she is Malay on her mother’s side upends her career ambitions and sense of identity.
Robles Bahrin, who spent some 20 years in corporate communications before moving to Langkawi to open the hotel, says that while the book is not autobiographical, she did draw on her own experience growing up mixed-race in Malaysia.
She is Malay on her father’s side, while her mother is from the Philippines and converted from Catholicism to Islam to marry her father.
"I’ve always described my own living experience as akin to walking a tightrope that’s coated with glass," says Robles Bahrin, who is Muslim. "If you stay on it, you’re going to get cut. If you fall off it, it’s going to hurt.
"Anybody who's biracial will understand this. But in a country like Malaysia, if one of those halves or quarters of you is Malay, there is a little bit more pressure on you, to the point where culturally it almost negates other parts of your heritage."
She says she would not be surprised if the book draws controversy for its frank discussion of race. "But you don’t grow up as me without developing some type of shell. You learn how to take things on the chin.
"Writing this book is also my way of trying to make sense of it all for myself."
Nanyang Technological University professor Shirley Chew, who was on the judging panel, hailed The Accidental Malay as "an intelligent, well-crafted and significant work".
"The narrative movement and the structure of the novel are constructed with a sharp sense of the dramatic. This is ably helped by a prose that is lively with flashes of wit," she said in a statement.
The other judges were author Amir Muhammad, publisher of Buku Fixi in Malaysia; T. Sasitharan, co-founder and director of Intercultural Theatre Institute in Singapore; Association of Women for Action and Research president Margaret Thomas; and Epigram Books publisher Edmund Wee.
The other finalists, who are all Singaporean - student Ng Ziqin, 20; private tutor Nisha Mehraj, 37; and general practitioner Tan Lip Hong, 58 - will each get $5,000.
All four shortlisted novels will be published in the second half of this year.
The prize, which is a cash advance against future royalties, was started in 2015 for Singapore writers and opened to writers from other Asean countries in 2018.
