The Epigram Books Fiction Prize was won by a Malaysian for the second time last Saturday.
Karina Robles Bahrin will receive $25,000 from the seventh edition of the prize, Singapore's only award for unpublished English-language novels.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 the 52-year-old who runs La Pari-Pari, a small hotel and restaurant, with her sister on the island of Langkawi.
While she had been thinking about the novel for 10 years, she began writing it only in March 2020, when Malaysia's pandemic lockdown decimated business at the hotel.
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 Leong clan. The discovery that she is Malay on her mother's side upends her career ambitions and sense of identity.
Robles Bahrin says while the book is not autobiographical, she drew 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," she says. "If you stay on it, you're going to get cut. If you fall off it, it's going to hurt.
"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 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.
