Amanda Lee Koe (born c. 1988)[2] is a Singapore-born, New York-based novelist and short story writer. She is best known for her debut novel Delayed Rays of A Star, published by Doubleday in July 2019, and for being the youngest winner of the Singapore Literature Prize.[3]Delayed Rays was named one of NPR's Best Books of 2019,[4] and was a Straits Times #1 bestseller.
Early life
Childhood
Koe was born in Singapore, the oldest of three children to Chinese parents who both worked for Singapore Airlines, her father as a pilot and her mother as a flight stewardess.[5] Her paternal grandfather was an opium-smoking Teochewlaborer from Guangdong who emigrated to Singapore.[5]
Koe has described her cultural experience growing up in 1990s Singapore as "omnivorous", watching Tsui Harkwuxia films and Disney movies.[5]
Koe attended an all-girls school in Singapore.[6] She fell in love with a female Uyghur soccer player when her softball team went on a training trip to Shanghai,[7] and was sent to corrective counseling when teachers found out she had a girlfriend.[5]
Koe became interested in Weimar culture, describing "a great affinity for Dada, Surrealism". She majored in cinema studies as an undergraduate in Singapore.[5]
Upon graduation, Koe applied to Cahiers du cinéma and burlesque clubs in Germany and Australia for work, but was not accepted. She sold vintage and handmade clothes on Etsy for a time.[5] While working as a waitress in a Japanese restaurant and freelancing for a creative agency, Koe had a manic episode, following which she resigned from her roles and began writing full time.[5]
Career
Singapore
In her early career in Singapore, Koe wrote short stories and supported herself with part-time editorial work. She was the fiction editor of Esquire Singapore, and the editor of the National Museum of Singapore’s film criticism magazine, Cinémathèque Quarterly.[8]
The stories she wrote in her early 20s, became the collection Ministry of Moral Panic. She considers the collection to be "an early work (...) raw (...) but necessary for me at that time".[9] The book, Koe's first, won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2014, making her the youngest winner of the prize.[10]
The same year, Koe received a scholarship to attend Columbia University’s Writing Program, which she attended.
New York
Koe moved to New York in 2014. She used her $10,000 prize money from the Singapore Literature Prize to pay the rent of her Brooklyn apartment.[11]
The working manuscript for Delayed Rays of a Star won the Henfield Prize in 2017, awarded to the best work of fiction in Columbia University’s Writing Program.[13] Koe was signed to the Wylie Agency, and the manuscript sold to Doubleday before she graduated.[6]
Work
Fiction
Ministry of Moral Panic
Ministry of Moral Panic was published by Singaporean independent press Epigram Books in 2013. The collection caused a sensation in Singapore's literary landscape when it was published,[10] for its uncommon and unflinching depiction of idiosyncratic characters from social peripheries told via inventive narratives that questioned the conservative Singaporean state's ideological imperatives.[14] It was seen as "a subversive, artistic interpretation of how to challenge the homogenising power of a dominant discourse".[15] Hannah Ming-yit Ho writes in Humanities (journal):
Koe's stories about idiosyncratic Singaporeans illustrate the way personal experiences—of memory loss, homosexual tendencies, and emotional self-expressions—are informed by, and in turn inform, the biopolitical regulation of Singaporean citizens rendered objects of biopower. In this way, her stories invite a meditation on the state, people and power.
For a novel so dense with historical fact and larger-than-life celebrity cameos (everyone from John F. Kennedy to Walter Benjamin to David Bowie), its portrayals are nuanced enough that each character comes off as deeply human regardless of their fame or importance to the novel's plot ... It's the steady accumulation of intimate details like these that creates a sweeping sense of history that feels truly alive ... Expansive, complex, and utterly engrossing.[17]
It is the moral tightropes each woman walks, and the razor thin edge between fulfilling one's ambition and selling one's soul, that is at the core of the novel (...) It is hard to summarize a sprawling and ambitious novel like this, so I won't — but it is expertly woven, its characters alive and full-bodied. Blending questions about pop culture, war, and art, Delayed Rays of a Star is that rare book that is neither high- nor low-brow, refusing such facile dichotomies and playing, instead, in the messiness of the grey areas.[18]
Non-fiction
Koe has advocated for the preservation of endangered modernist architecture in Singapore.[19] She has also commented on the Singapore state's "value-free pragmatism", a ruling style put in place by the late founding father of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew.[20]
