Dentist’s book wins top prize

A panel of five judges, including Everything Everywhere All At Once star Michelle Yeoh, chose a novel about a group of Indian women learning to swim in a Singapore condominium as the winner of an annual literary award for local fiction.

Titled The Campbell Gardens Ladies’ Swimming Class, the as yet unpublished manuscript was selected as the winner of the Epigram Books Fiction Prize 2023 on Thursday night. It is the debut work of dentist Vrushali Junnarkar (pic), an Indian national currently living in Singapore.

Her work beat 56 other submissions from Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Brunei, Indonesia and the Philippines, earning the nod from the judges, who also included Epigram Books chief executive Edmund Wee, National University of Singapore Press director Peter Schoppert, humanities lecturer at Yale-NUS College Carissa Foo and author Meira Chand.

“I was a little sceptical. Such a modest conceit to support an entire novel. But the verdict was yes, yes indeed! Once you took the plunge ... I’m sorry about the water puns,” said Schoppert to laughs during the award ceremony at Conrad Centennial Singapore.

He quoted the verdict of a judge, whom he did not name: “It isn’t just water but the subduing of desire. The taming of passions, survival in overwhelming spaces. It becomes a whole world with its power relations and its judgemental watchers from the windows, real and imagined.

“The anxieties faced by these immigrant women, residents and their domestic workers (are) very much part of the story, balancing cultures and identities that are conveyed with humour and with a gently satirical stance.”

The panel of judges selected the winner from four finalists, whittled down from the larger pool by a group of readers.

“The verdict was not unanimous but neither was it highly contentious. We all valued the achievements of the novels a great deal. We saw the strengths and weaknesses from different vantage points.

“That’s the great thing about literature,” Schoppert said.

Dr Vrushali was not in Singapore to receive the award. Her manuscript will be published in the second half of 2023 by Epigram Books.

The works of the three other finalists will also be published. They are: Meihan Boey’s sequel to her successful The Formidable Miss Cassidy (2021), The Enigmatic Madam Ingram, rights for which have already been bought by British independent publisher Pushkin Press; Ally Chua’s mysterious tale of an oil palm family dynasty, The Disappearance Of Patrick Zhou; and John Gresham’s iteration of Planet Of The Apes in Singapore, Gus: The Life & Opinions Of The Last Raffles’ Banded Langur.

The latter two will also be published by Epigram Books.

Yeoh was not in Singapore to attend the ceremony, a subject for some regret on Thursday from attendees, which included authors and sponsors.

She is currently making her rounds on the media circuit after her Oscar nomination for Best Actress. — The Straits Times/ANN