Amanda Chong is a lawyer trained in Cambridge and Harvard, who writes on her lunch breaks. Her poetry has been engraved on the Marina Bay Helix Bridge and included in the Cambridge International GCSE syllabus. Her first collection of poems, Professions (2016), was shortlisted for the 2018 Singapore Literature Prize. She was playwright for the musical, The Feelings Farm, produced by the Esplanade in 2021. She is interested in exploring themes of gender and power in both her poetry and academic writing, which has been published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender. Her creative work has appeared in Monocle, The Straits Times and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore.
Amanda also co-founded ReadAble, a non-profit organization that runs weekly English literacy classes for children and migrant women in a low-income neighbourhood since 2014, with the aim of improving social mobility. She was founding web editor of poetry.sg, the first online database of Singapore poetry, complete with critical analyses and a multimedia archive. She was awarded the Singapore Youth Award in 2018, the nation’s highest accolade for youths, and was named to the Generation T List of young leaders shaping Asia’s future in 2019. She was appointed to the Panel of Advisers to the Youth Court by the President of Singapore in 2020.
