Singaporean writer wins regional prize in Commonwealth Short Story Competition
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Agnes Chew's Oceans Away From My Homeland follows a young Singaporean woman living in Germany who has a health scare.
PHOTO: Pascal Andernacht
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SINGAPORE – Singaporean writer Agnes Chew has won the Commonwealth Short Story Competition regional prize with her work, Oceans Away From My Homeland.
The prize, announced on May 17 and awarded annually by the Commonwealth Foundation, comes with £2,500 (S$4,200).
Oceans Away From My Homeland follows a young Singaporean woman living in Germany who has a health scare when she finds out that she has a lump in her breast. This makes her acutely aware of her distance from home and the life she left behind.
Another Singaporean writer, Sofia Mariah Ma, clinched the same prize in 2022 for her work, The Last Diver On Earth.
The Commonwealth Foundation, an inter-governmental organisation based in London, has awarded writers from Africa, the Americas, Europe and Asia annually for the best piece of unpublished short fiction since 2012.
The overall winner will be announced on June 27 from among five regional winners, including from South Africa, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Jamaica. The overall winner will get £5,000.
No Singaporean has won the overall prize.
Chew, who is based in Hesse, Germany, says over e-mail that she wrote her story “in a feverish span of a few days and spent a week revising it before submitting it”.
The 34-year-old, who has a master’s in international development from the London School of Economics, was born and raised in Singapore.
Asked about the parallels between the life of the narrator of her story and herself, she says the story is fictional but “autobiographical in feeling”, in the words of Canadian short story writer Alice Munro.
Chew, who is married with no children, adds: “Living away from your home country entails learning to embrace the ways of being in your adopted country, while bearing the ache of leaving your motherland. I wanted to explore through my story the cultural complexities of that experience, and how it can shape one’s sense of identity and belonging, especially from a woman’s perspective.”
This is her third time submitting an entry to the Commonwealth Short Story Competition.
Her works include The Desire For Elsewhere, a collection of non-fiction travel essays published by Math Paper Press in 2016, and Eternal Summer Of My Homeland, a short story collection published by Epigram Books that will be released at the end of May.
Chew says: “Writing short stories demands a distilled focus on purity and intensity.”
She is now working on a novel. “While it requires more time and commitment as compared with writing a short story, there is more room for the exploration of ideas and themes, especially from multiple points of view.”
