The Last Boy And The Lord Of Three Worlds

I speak to two-time Singapore Literature Prize winner Ng Yi-Sheng about his new novel Utama, and discover that, in the search for a 'Singaporean Identity,' while it is yet to be seen if he has the answer, he can certainly point us in the right direction.

- WORDS SUFFIAN HAKIM PHOTOS EPIGRAM BOOKS

IF THERE'S ANYBODY'S MIND PALACE that I'd love to wander in, it would be Ng Yi-Sheng's. He's one of my favourite people to speak to, though it's sometimes hard to keep up with him in a conversation. His mind is a multifaceted, sprawling, wondrous thing, and he might make connections about a topic mid-conversation before careening off into a deeper analysis of this new tangent. I don't mind it; it's a symptom of his profound knowledge of local, regional, and sometimes global mythology, history, literature, and culture.

Born in 1980, Ng is the ultimate cultural multi-hyphenate. He is a poet, novelist, academic, activist and editor. He is a prominent figure in the local literary scene, having won two Singapore Literature Prizes. The first was in 2008 for his debut poetry collection, last boy, and the second happened recently in 2020 for his speculative fiction short story collection, Lion City.

In August, he released the highly anticipated Utama. It's a spellbinding retelling of Sang Nila Utama’s rise to prominence, before the Palembang prince chanced upon the island of Temasek.

The Origins of Utama

“Singapore's early legendary histories have always fascinated me,” says Ng. “A lot of this started in 2014 when I was doing my Master's degree at the University of East Anglia. I took a course on Historical Fiction. Although everything was nice, liberal, and multiracial, it was disturbing how Anglo-centric and Euro-centric the syllabus was. The closest thing to a non-Western work we had on the reading list was Toni Morrison's Beloved. The first example of a historical novel, according to that syllabus, is Walter Scott's Waverley. I was like, so (Luo Guanzhong’s 14th century historical novel)