We're delighted to share the news that Jee Leong Koh has been shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize 2024 in two categories! He is shortlisted in the Poetry category with his 2022 Carcanet collection, Inspector Inspector, and in the Creative Non-Fiction category with Sample and Loop: A Simple History of Singaporeans in America (2023, Gaudy Boy). Many congratulations to Jee, and to all the other shortlisted writers and publishers!

This year's shortlist includes shortlist 71 works across 18 categories. Organised by the Singapore Book Council (SBC), the list includes a mix of new and veteran writers for both fiction and poetry in English. Beginning in 1992 with only a fiction prize, the award is one of the most prestigious Singaporean literary prizes for published books. It has taken place biennially since 2006, when it introduced language categories for works in English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil.

The winners will be announced on 10 September at a public ceremony. Find out more about the prize and information about the ceremony here.

Jee Leong Koh writes out of the heart of a contemporary reality most readers are familiar with at second or third hand. He writes of political exile and spiritual homelessness; he understands the perils of war, and the perils of certain kinds of peace. Inspector Inspector is his second Carcanet book (Steep Tea was published in 2015 and chosen as a Best Book of the Year in the Financial Times), and it develops his earlier themes with authority, passion and a sense of possible justice.

Steep Tea dialogued with women poets from across the world; Inspector Inspector struggles with the legacies of fathers, personal, poetic and political. Threaded through the erotic poems and poems based on interviews with fellow Singaporeans living in America are thirteen palinodes in the voice of the speaker's dead father, which he answers when the father's voice falls silent.

Jee Leong Koh's is an inclusive, generous and forgiving imagination, with an enviable mastery of traditional and experimental forms.