The shortlists for two book prizes to be given out in May - the Scholastic Asian Book Award and the Singapore Book Awards - have been unveiled.

Five authors are vying for the $10,000 first prize that comes with the Scholastic Asian Book Award.

They are Stephanie Ho from Singapore, Tina Cho from South Korea, Golda Mowe from Malaysia and Aditi Krishnakumar and Varsha Seshan from India.

The shortlisted entries were announced by the National Book Development Council of Singapore and Scholastic Asia on Monday and were whittled down from a pool of 54 submissions from 11 countries.

Sponsored by the Asian arm of American publishing giant Scholastic, which specialises in educational content, the biennial award is one of the richest prizes for unpublished works of children's fiction.

It gives the winner and runners-up a chance to be published.

The council declines to name the three judges, but a spokesman for the judging panel tells The Straits Times that overall, the quality of submissions this year is high.

He says: "It's easy to imagine a number of the manuscripts being published with only a modest amount of editing... in most of the good ones, young people are shown grappling with questions of identity, cultural displacement, the meaning of friendship and family - concerns most readers can identify with."

Singapore's Ho, 45, a writer and historical researcher, is in the running for her manuscript, Island Girl. She has previously written children's books used for social studies in primary schools.

Set in the Malay Archipelago in the 1800s, her story follows Habi- bah, a girl who receives a wedding proposal when she turns 13 and finds out that her long-lost mother is alive.

Ho says: "I'm a historian, so I have been fascinated by the offshore islands near Indonesia. I had been thinking of writing a story about them for years, so my friends told me, 'Stop talking about it, just write'."

She will square off against the other four writers.

Cho's story Chasing Freedom: The Asian Underground Railroad, chronicles the journey of two North Korean children as they attempt to flee their home country.

Speaking to The Straits Times via e-mail, the 44-year-old, a first- grade teacher who found a church organisation online which helps North Koreans, says she interviewed two children and a pastor for her tale.

She adds: "I was concerned about how much violence and evil could be in a middle-grade novel.

"I consulted texts that dealt with heavy topics such as Lois Lowry's Number The Stars and Linda Sue Park's A Long Walk To Water. Children need to know the truth in an age-appropriate manner. Given today's headlines, I feel they can handle quite a lot."

The award winner will be announced at the opening of the Asian Festival Of Children's Content on May 24, where the book from the winning manuscript from 2014 - Filipino writer Sophia Lee's What Things Mean - will also be launched. It is about a young girl who struggles to reconcile the differences between her and her peers.

The Singapore Book Awards, organised by the Singapore Book Publishers Association to recognise the best in book publishing here, will return in May. The awards were first given out in 2012.

The awards were not given out in 2013 and 2014, as the association was focused on building up the presence of the Singapore publishing industry at overseas book fairs then, says a spokesman.

Last year's awards were postponed to this year as the associa- tion, which has 67 members, had "modified the guidelines and wanted to give sufficient time for publishers to benefit from these changes", says its president, publisher Peter Schoppert, who is director of NUS Press.

Shortlisted books must be published in one of the four official Singapore languages and be published between Jan 1, 2013 and Nov 1 last year. They must have a Singapore International Standard Book Number, with hard copies legally deposited with the National Library Board. Books sold in print must be sold in retail stores here or overseas.

No prizes are given out for the awards and the judging panel has members from different sectors in the book industry, including authors, educators and bookstore directors.

The association declines to name the judges.

The eight awards are Best Children's Title, Best Fiction Title, Best Non-Fiction Title, Best Education Title, Best Book Cover Design, Best Young Adults' Title, Best Digital Work and Book Of The Year.

There is no shortlist for Book Of The Year, which will be judged after the other awards are decided.

They will be given out at a ceremony on May 11.