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About the Author

Singapore, where driven foreign women have a hard time finding work: a Harvard-educated mother struggles to find an outlet for her loaded brain. Meanwhile, her marriage with an asexual husband, who has made Singapore their forever home in a Machiavellian call, unravels.

Stamford Hospital follows its disturbed protagonist over two nights, as Tarisa goes through familiar motions of motherhood for their child. The only difference this weekend: she hospitalizes the young Mia even though Mia is barely ill.

Using the hospital as childcare, Tarisa lives entrenched in her mind, facing demons whispering that the love she gets from this family unit won’t make her own life less devastating. But what is devastation anyway, when everything that leads to it can be rationalized?
Thammika Songkaeo is a transnational novelist, non-fiction writer, and film producer of Thai origin, whose lived experiences in India, Uganda, Rwanda, the United States, and Singapore, have informed the making of Stamford Hospital, her debut novel following a nomination to the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, which she attended on a Katharine Bakeless Nason Scholarship, a fellowship to the Comparative Literature PhD program of the University of Texas at Austin, and a grant from the Smithsonian Freer|Sackler Galleries. She earned Highest Honors for her study of French Literature at Williams College and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Vermont College of Fine Arts before becoming a Storytelling grantee of the National Geographic Society in 2022 and continuing a transnational gaze on stories of the relationship between womanhood and society. Her writing, including a feature of monologues, has appeared in Ninth Letter and in World Literature Today online, and for the Singapore National Library Board.

When not writing, she will be found working on social and environmental issues through her company, Two Glasses LLP, designing experiences that transform how people think and feel about their identity and planetary mayhem. She is the Producer of Changing Room, a dance film that asks, “What does criticizing our bodies have to do with climate change?” and its global experiential screenings that utilize somatic practices and guided journaling. Her social science work has been referenced by Brookings Institution and The Journal of Southeast Asian Human Rights. Despite these, she identifies equally as a writer.

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Stamford Hospital