Shawn Hoo’s top reads of 2025: Arundhati Roy, Ng Yi-Sheng and Wahidah Tambee

SINGAPORE –In 2019, when Singapore was commemorating the bicentennial of Sir Stamford Raffles’ arrival in 1819, four new statues rose up along the Singapore River next to Raffles’ – one of which was of Sang Nila Utama, the 13th-century Palembang prince who founded Singapura.

Statues simplify history – and every man placed on a literal pedestal is open to have his legacy interrogated and complicated. Writers have rightly done so with the British colonial officer and, in 2025, Sang Nila Utama is being cast in a brilliant and complicated light by Singaporean writer Ng Yi-Sheng.

The two-time Singapore Literature Prize-winner’s Utama

is one of my top reads of 2025 in a crowded field of historical fiction. Utama is pre-colonial historical fiction imagined from “below”. The loose biographical novelisation of Sang Nila Utama narrated not from the legendary prince’s perspective, but seen through the eyes of the dispossessed – his subjects, wives and children.

A beautifully written scene in the middle section of the book has stayed with me. The women of Palembang, disposed of by their lusty prince who has taken 39 wives, take shelter in a Mahadewi shrine and start a new life in a women-centred community. In spell-binding prose that blends fantasy and history, Ng’s Utama should be compulsory reading as Singapore continues to reckon with its past.

Within the family home, too, there are complicated legacies.

Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy’s first memoir Mother Mary Comes To Me

is my favourite non-fiction read of the year. Roy reckons with her late mother, who was feted as a revolutionary feminist and often violent and coercive at home.

The work is a rare look at the childhood of Roy, who has more consistently written explicitly political books on topics such as Naxalite communist guerillas, destructive dam projects, Hindu nationalism and global capitalism. Her earlier books are banned in Indian-administered Kashmir, but Roy remains a resolute writer of conscience.

But this is not a book devoid of politics. It, in fact, can be read as an origin story of Roy’s political beliefs. She writes of her mercurial mother’s influence: “The way she was with him (Roy’s brother) has queered and complicated my view of feminism forever, filled it with caveats.”

My Singapore poetry book of the year is poet Wahidah Tambee’s Eke

, which stands out in a crowd of exciting debut poetry collections published in 2025 by local presses, including the newly formed Afterimage.

The collection’s palindromic title consisting of merely two different letters is perhaps emblematic of the book’s economy and ethos of whittling words down to their bare essentials – a rare adventure in concrete poetry in Singapore. Its title, too, suggests the difficulty of producing meaningful language, which is apt for a year that has been flooded with texts by large-language models.

This mesmerising debut collection plays with typography to bring out the stutters in seemingly innocent everyday words. The poems – which resemble little islets of words – have an affinity with text-based art and selected poems have recently been brought out in limited broadside editions.

Poetry might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but try to see how you read these poems aloud and ponder a few of them a day. You might just find your view of ordinary words upended and refreshed.